Physics-driven Synthetic Data Learning for Biomedical Magnetic Resonance

Deep learning has innovated the field of computational imaging. One of its bottlenecks is unavailable or insufficient training data. This article reviews an emerging paradigm, imaging physics-based data synthesis (IPADS), that can provide huge training data in biomedical magnetic resonance without or with few real data. Following the physical law of magnetic resonance, IPADS generates signals from differential equations or analytical solution models, making the learning more scalable, explainable, and better protecting privacy. Key components of IPADS learning, including signal generation models, basic deep learning network structures, enhanced data generation, and learning methods are discussed. Great potentials of IPADS have been demonstrated by representative applications in fast imaging, ultrafast signal reconstruction and accurate parameter quantification. Finally, open questions and future work have been discussed.

DialogueNeRF: Towards Realistic Avatar Face-to-face Conversation Video Generation

Conversation is an essential component of virtual avatar activities in the metaverse. With the development of natural language processing, textual and vocal conversation generation has achieved a significant breakthrough. Face-to-face conversations account for the vast majority of daily conversations. However, this task has not acquired enough attention. In this paper, we propose a novel task that aims to generate a realistic human avatar face-to-face conversation process and present a new dataset to explore this target. To tackle this novel task, we propose a new framework that utilizes a series of conversation signals, e.g. audio, head pose, and expression, to synthesize face-to-face conversation videos between human avatars, with all the interlocutors modeled within the same network. Our method is evaluated by quantitative and qualitative experiments in different aspects, e.g. image quality, pose sequence trend, and naturalness of the rendering videos. All the code, data, and models will be made publicly available.

A Quantitative Geometric Approach to Neural Network Smoothness

Fast and precise Lipschitz constant estimation of neural networks is an important task for deep learning. Researchers have recently found an intrinsic trade-off between the accuracy and smoothness of neural networks, so training a network with a loose Lipschitz constant estimation imposes a strong regularization and can hurt the model accuracy significantly. In this work, we provide a unified theoretical framework, a quantitative geometric approach, to address the Lipschitz constant estimation. By adopting this framework, we can immediately obtain several theoretical results, including the computational hardness of Lipschitz constant estimation and its approximability. Furthermore, the quantitative geometric perspective can also provide some insights into recent empirical observations that techniques for one norm do not usually transfer to another one. We also implement the algorithms induced from this quantitative geometric approach in a tool GeoLIP. These algorithms are based on semidefinite programming (SDP). Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that GeoLIP is more scalable and precise than existing tools on Lipschitz constant estimation for $\ell_\infty$-perturbations. Furthermore, we also show its intricate relations with other recent SDP-based techniques, both theoretically and empirically. We believe that this unified quantitative geometric perspective can bring new insights and theoretical tools to the investigation of neural-network smoothness and robustness.

Onsite Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging via Online Calibrations

There has been an increasing interest in deploying non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging systems for recovering objects behind an obstacle. Existing solutions generally pre-calibrate the system before scanning the hidden objects. Onsite adjustments of the occluder, object and scanning pattern require re-calibration. We present an online calibration technique that directly decouples the acquired transients at onsite scanning into the LOS and hidden components. We use the former to directly (re)calibrate the system upon changes of scene/obstacle configurations, scanning regions, and scanning patterns whereas the latter for hidden object recovery via spatial, frequency or learning based techniques. Our technique avoids using auxiliary calibration apparatus such as mirrors or checkerboards and supports both laboratory validations and real-world deployments.

One-dimensional Deep Low-rank and Sparse Network for Accelerated MRI

Deep learning has shown astonishing performance in accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Most state-of-the-art deep learning reconstructions adopt the powerful convolutional neural network and perform 2D convolution since many magnetic resonance images or their corresponding k-space are in 2D. In this work, we present a new approach that explores the 1D convolution, making the deep network much easier to be trained and generalized. We further integrate the 1D convolution into the proposed deep network, named as One-dimensional Deep Low-rank and Sparse network (ODLS), which unrolls the iteration procedure of a low-rank and sparse reconstruction model. Extensive results on in vivo knee and brain datasets demonstrate that, the proposed ODLS is very suitable for the case of limited training subjects and provides improved reconstruction performance than state-of-the-art methods both visually and quantitatively. Additionally, ODLS also shows nice robustness to different undersampling scenarios and some mismatches between the training and test data. In summary, our work demonstrates that the 1D deep learning scheme is memory-efficient and robust in fast MRI.

Automatic prior selection for meta Bayesian optimization with a case study on tuning deep neural network optimizers

The performance of deep neural networks can be highly sensitive to the choice of a variety of meta-parameters, such as optimizer parameters and model hyperparameters. Tuning these well, however, often requires extensive and costly experimentation. Bayesian optimization (BO) is a principled approach to solve such expensive hyperparameter tuning problems efficiently. Key to the performance of BO is specifying and refining a distribution over functions, which is used to reason about the optima of the underlying function being optimized. In this work, we consider the scenario where we have data from similar functions that allows us to specify a tighter distribution a priori. Specifically, we focus on the common but potentially costly task of tuning optimizer parameters for training neural networks. Building on the meta BO method from Wang et al. (2018), we develop practical improvements that (a) boost its performance by leveraging tuning results on multiple tasks without requiring observations for the same meta-parameter points across all tasks, and (b) retain its regret bound for a special case of our method. As a result, we provide a coherent BO solution for iterative optimization of continuous optimizer parameters. To verify our approach in realistic model training setups, we collected a large multi-task hyperparameter tuning dataset by training tens of thousands of configurations of near-state-of-the-art models on popular image and text datasets, as well as a protein sequence dataset. Our results show that on average, our method is able to locate good hyperparameters at least 3 times more efficiently than the best competing methods.

Zero-Shot Knowledge Distillation from a Decision-Based Black-Box Model

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a successful approach for deep neural network acceleration, with which a compact network (student) is trained by mimicking the softmax output of a pre-trained high-capacity network (teacher). In tradition, KD usually relies on access to the training samples and the parameters of the white-box teacher to acquire the transferred knowledge. However, these prerequisites are not always realistic due to storage costs or privacy issues in real-world applications. Here we propose the concept of decision-based black-box (DB3) knowledge distillation, with which the student is trained by distilling the knowledge from a black-box teacher (parameters are not accessible) that only returns classes rather than softmax outputs. We start with the scenario when the training set is accessible. We represent a sample's robustness against other classes by computing its distances to the teacher's decision boundaries and use it to construct the soft label for each training sample. After that, the student can be trained via standard KD. We then extend this approach to a more challenging scenario in which even accessing the training data is not feasible. We propose to generate pseudo samples distinguished by the teacher's decision boundaries to the largest extent and construct soft labels for them, which are used as the transfer set. We evaluate our approaches on various benchmark networks and datasets and experiment results demonstrate their effectiveness. Codes are available at: https://github.com/zwang84/zsdb3kd.

XCloud-pFISTA: A Medical Intelligence Cloud for Accelerated MRI

Machine learning and artificial intelligence have shown remarkable performance in accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Cloud computing technologies have great advantages in building an easily accessible platform to deploy advanced algorithms. In this work, we develop an open-access, easy-to-use and high-performance medical intelligence cloud computing platform (XCloud-pFISTA) to reconstruct MRI images from undersampled k-space data. Two state-of-the-art approaches of the Projected Fast Iterative Soft-Thresholding Algorithm (pFISTA) family have been successfully implemented on the cloud. This work can be considered as a good example of cloud-based medical image reconstruction and may benefit the future development of integrated reconstruction and online diagnosis system.

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation with Soft Targeted Transfer Set Synthesis

Knowledge distillation (KD) has proved to be an effective approach for deep neural network compression, which learns a compact network (student) by transferring the knowledge from a pre-trained, over-parameterized network (teacher). In traditional KD, the transferred knowledge is usually obtained by feeding training samples to the teacher network to obtain the class probabilities. However, the original training dataset is not always available due to storage costs or privacy issues. In this study, we propose a novel data-free KD approach by modeling the intermediate feature space of the teacher with a multivariate normal distribution and leveraging the soft targeted labels generated by the distribution to synthesize pseudo samples as the transfer set. Several student networks trained with these synthesized transfer sets present competitive performance compared to the networks trained with the original training set and other data-free KD approaches.

Convolutional Neural Network Pruning with Structural Redundancy Reduction

Convolutional neural network (CNN) pruning has become one of the most successful network compression approaches in recent years. Existing works on network pruning usually focus on removing the least important filters in the network to achieve compact architectures. In this study, we claim that identifying structural redundancy plays a more essential role than finding unimportant filters, theoretically and empirically. We first statistically model the network pruning problem in a redundancy reduction perspective and find that pruning in the layer(s) with the most structural redundancy outperforms pruning the least important filters across all layers. Based on this finding, we then propose a network pruning approach that identifies structural redundancy of a CNN and prunes filters in the selected layer(s) with the most redundancy. Experiments on various benchmark network architectures and datasets show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art.