Automated Assessment of Critical View of Safety in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal) is one of the most common procedures in the US, with more than 1.2M procedures annually. Compared with classical open cholecystectomy, laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) is associated with significantly shorter recovery period, and hence is the preferred method. However, LC is also associated with an increase in bile duct injuries (BDIs), resulting in significant morbidity and mortality. The primary cause of BDIs from LCs is misidentification of the cystic duct with the bile duct. Critical view of safety (CVS) is the most effective of safety protocols, which is said to be achieved during the surgery if certain criteria are met. However, due to suboptimal understanding and implementation of CVS, the BDI rates have remained stable over the last three decades. In this paper, we develop deep-learning techniques to automate the assessment of CVS in LCs. An innovative aspect of our research is on developing specialized learning techniques by incorporating domain knowledge to compensate for the limited training data available in practice. In particular, our CVS assessment process involves a fusion of two segmentation maps followed by an estimation of a certain region of interest based on anatomical structures close to the gallbladder, and then finally determination of each of the three CVS criteria via rule-based assessment of structural information. We achieved a gain of over 11.8% in mIoU on relevant classes with our two-stream semantic segmentation approach when compared to a single-model baseline, and 1.84% in mIoU with our proposed Sobel loss function when compared to a Transformer-based baseline model. For CVS criteria, we achieved up to 16% improvement and, for the overall CVS assessment, we achieved 5% improvement in balanced accuracy compared to DeepCVS under the same experiment settings.

Least Square Value Iteration is Robust Under Locally Bounded Misspecification Error

The success of reinforcement learning heavily relies on the function approximation of policy, value or models, where misspecification (a mismatch between the ground-truth and best function approximators) naturally occurs especially when the ground-truth is complex. As misspecification error does not vanish even with infinite number of samples, designing algorithms that are robust under misspecification is of paramount importance. Recently, it is shown that policy-based approaches can be robust even when the policy function approximation is under a large locally-bounded misspecification error, with which the function class may have $\Omega(1)$ approximation error in certain states and actions but is only small on average under a policy-induced state-distribution; whereas it is only known that value-based approach can effectively learn under globally-bounded misspecification error, i.e., the approximation errors to value functions have a uniform upper bound on all state-actions. Yet it remains an open question whether similar robustness can be achieved with value-based approaches. In this paper, we answer this question affirmatively by showing that the algorithm, Least-Square-Value-Iteration [Jin et al, 2020], with carefully designed exploration bonus can achieve robustness under local misspecification error bound. In particular, we show that algorithm achieves a regret bound of $\widetilde{O}\left(\sqrt{d^3KH^4} + dKH^2\zeta \right)$, where $d$ is the dimension of linear features, $H$ is the length of the episode, $K$ is the total number of episodes, and $\zeta$ is the local bound of the misspecification error. Moreover, we show that the algorithm can achieve the same regret bound without knowing $\zeta$ and can be used as robust policy evaluation oracle that can be applied to improve sample complexity in policy-based approaches.

Low-Switching Policy Gradient with Exploration via Online Sensitivity Sampling

Policy optimization methods are powerful algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their flexibility to deal with policy parameterization and ability to handle model misspecification. However, these methods usually suffer from slow convergence rates and poor sample complexity. Hence it is important to design provably sample efficient algorithms for policy optimization. Yet, recent advances for this problems have only been successful in tabular and linear setting, whose benign structures cannot be generalized to non-linearly parameterized policies. In this paper, we address this problem by leveraging recent advances in value-based algorithms, including bounded eluder-dimension and online sensitivity sampling, to design a low-switching sample-efficient policy optimization algorithm, LPO, with general non-linear function approximation. We show that, our algorithm obtains an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy with only $\widetilde{O}(\frac{\text{poly}(d)}{\varepsilon^3})$ samples, where $\varepsilon$ is the suboptimality gap and $d$ is a complexity measure of the function class approximating the policy. This drastically improves previously best-known sample bound for policy optimization algorithms, $\widetilde{O}(\frac{\text{poly}(d)}{\varepsilon^8})$. Moreover, we empirically test our theory with deep neural nets to show the benefits of the theoretical inspiration.

Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Prototype-based Imputation

In this paper, we study how to achieve two characteristics highly-expected by incomplete multi-view clustering (IMvC). Namely, i) instance commonality refers to that within-cluster instances should share a common pattern, and ii) view versatility refers to that cross-view samples should own view-specific patterns. To this end, we design a novel dual-stream model which employs a dual attention layer and a dual contrastive learning loss to learn view-specific prototypes and model the sample-prototype relationship. When the view is missed, our model performs data recovery using the prototypes in the missing view and the sample-prototype relationship inherited from the observed view. Thanks to our dual-stream model, both cluster- and view-specific information could be captured, and thus the instance commonality and view versatility could be preserved to facilitate IMvC. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method on six challenging benchmarks compared with 11 approaches. The code will be released.

Deep Fair Clustering via Maximizing and Minimizing Mutual Information

Fair clustering aims to divide data into distinct clusters, while preventing sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, RNA sequencing technique) from dominating the clustering. Although a number of works have been conducted and achieved huge success in recent, most of them are heuristical, and there lacks a unified theory for algorithm design. In this work, we fill this blank by developing a mutual information theory for deep fair clustering and accordingly designing a novel algorithm, dubbed FCMI. In brief, through maximizing and minimizing mutual information, FCMI is designed to achieve four characteristics highly expected by deep fair clustering, i.e., compact, balanced, and fair clusters, as well as informative features. Besides the contributions to theory and algorithm, another contribution of this work is proposing a novel fair clustering metric built upon information theory as well. Unlike existing evaluation metrics, our metric measures the clustering quality and fairness in a whole instead of separate manner. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed FCMI, we carry out experiments on six benchmarks including a single-cell RNA-seq atlas compared with 11 state-of-the-art methods in terms of five metrics. Code will be released after the acceptance.

Surgical Phase Recognition in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Automatic recognition of surgical phases in surgical videos is a fundamental task in surgical workflow analysis. In this report, we propose a Transformer-based method that utilizes calibrated confidence scores for a 2-stage inference pipeline, which dynamically switches between a baseline model and a separately trained transition model depending on the calibrated confidence level. Our method outperforms the baseline model on the Cholec80 dataset, and can be applied to a variety of action segmentation methods.

Contrastive Clustering

In this paper, we propose a one-stage online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, the positive and negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations and then projected into a feature space. Therein, the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning are respectively conducted in the row and column space by maximizing the similarities of positive pairs while minimizing those of negative ones. Our key observation is that the rows of the feature matrix could be regarded as soft labels of instances, and accordingly the columns could be further regarded as cluster representations. By simultaneously optimizing the instance- and cluster-level contrastive loss, the model jointly learns representations and cluster assignments in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results show that CC remarkably outperforms 17 competitive clustering methods on six challenging image benchmarks. In particular, CC achieves an NMI of 0.705 (0.431) on the CIFAR-10 (CIFAR-100) dataset, which is an up to 19\% (39\%) performance improvement compared with the best baseline.

Large Scale Many-Objective Optimization Driven by Distributional Adversarial Networks

Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDA) as one of the EAs is a stochastic optimization problem which establishes a probability model to describe the distribution of solutions and randomly samples the probability model to create offspring and optimize model and population. Reference Vector Guided Evolutionary (RVEA) based on the EDA framework, having a better performance to solve MaOPs. Besides, using the generative adversarial networks to generate offspring solutions is also a state-of-art thought in EAs instead of crossover and mutation. In this paper, we will propose a novel algorithm based on RVEA[1] framework and using Distributional Adversarial Networks (DAN) [2]to generate new offspring. DAN uses a new distributional framework for adversarial training of neural networks and operates on genuine samples rather than a single point because the framework also leads to more stable training and extraordinarily better mode coverage compared to single-point-sample methods. Thereby, DAN can quickly generate offspring with high convergence regarding the same distribution of data. In addition, we also use Large-Scale Multi-Objective Optimization Based on A Competitive Swarm Optimizer (LMOCSO)[3] to adopts a new two-stage strategy to update the position in order to significantly increase the search efficiency to find optimal solutions in huge decision space. The propose new algorithm will be tested on 9 benchmark problems in Large scale multi-objective problems (LSMOP). To measure the performance, we will compare our proposal algorithm with some state-of-art EAs e.g., RM-MEDA[4], MO-CMA[10] and NSGA-II.

Many-Objective Estimation of Distribution Optimization Algorithm Based on WGAN-GP

Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDA) are stochastic optimization algorithms. EDA establishes a probability model to describe the distribution of solution from the perspective of population macroscopically by statistical learning method, and then randomly samples the probability model to generate a new population. EDA can better solve multi-objective optimal problems (MOPs). However, the performance of EDA decreases in solving many-objective optimal problems (MaOPs), which contains more than three objectives. Reference Vector Guided Evolutionary Algorithm (RVEA), based on the EDA framework, can better solve MaOPs. In our paper, we use the framework of RVEA. However, we generate the new population by Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks-Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) instead of using crossover and mutation. WGAN-GP have advantages of fast convergence, good stability and high sample quality. WGAN-GP learn the mapping relationship from standard normal distribution to given data set distribution based on a given data set subject to the same distribution. It can quickly generate populations with high diversity and good convergence. To measure the performance, RM-MEDA, MOPSO and NSGA-II are selected to perform comparison experiments over DTLZ and LSMOP test suites with 3-, 5-, 8-, 10- and 15-objective.