The infant brain undergoes rapid development in the first few years after birth.Compared to cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies can depict the trajectories of infants brain development with higher accuracy, statistical power and flexibility.However, the collection of infant longitudinal magnetic resonance (MR) data suffers a notorious dropout problem, resulting in incomplete datasets with missing time points. This limitation significantly impedes subsequent neuroscience and clinical modeling. Yet, existing deep generative models are facing difficulties in missing brain image completion, due to sparse data and the nonlinear, dramatic contrast/geometric variations in the developing brain. We propose LoCI-DiffCom, a novel Longitudinal Consistency-Informed Diffusion model for infant brain image Completion,which integrates the images from preceding and subsequent time points to guide a diffusion model for generating high-fidelity missing data. Our designed LoCI module can work on highly sparse sequences, relying solely on data from two temporal points. Despite wide separation and diversity between age time points, our approach can extract individualized developmental features while ensuring context-aware consistency. Our experiments on a large infant brain MR dataset demonstrate its effectiveness with consistent performance on missing infant brain MR completion even in big gap scenarios, aiding in better delineation of early developmental trajectories.
Large language models (LLMs), especially generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), have recently demonstrated outstanding ability in information comprehension and problem-solving. This has motivated many studies in applying LLMs to wireless communication networks. In this paper, we propose a pre-trained LLM-empowered framework to perform fully automatic network intrusion detection. Three in-context learning methods are designed and compared to enhance the performance of LLMs. With experiments on a real network intrusion detection dataset, in-context learning proves to be highly beneficial in improving the task processing performance in a way that no further training or fine-tuning of LLMs is required. We show that for GPT-4, testing accuracy and F1-Score can be improved by 90%. Moreover, pre-trained LLMs demonstrate big potential in performing wireless communication-related tasks. Specifically, the proposed framework can reach an accuracy and F1-Score of over 95% on different types of attacks with GPT-4 using only 10 in-context learning examples.
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising energy-efficient alternative to artificial neural networks (ANNs), in virtue of their high biological plausibility, rich spatial-temporal dynamics, and event-driven computation. The direct training algorithms based on the surrogate gradient method provide sufficient flexibility to design novel SNN architectures and explore the spatial-temporal dynamics of SNNs. According to previous studies, the performance of models is highly dependent on their sizes. Recently, direct training deep SNNs have achieved great progress on both neuromorphic datasets and large-scale static datasets. Notably, transformer-based SNNs show comparable performance with their ANN counterparts. In this paper, we provide a new perspective to summarize the theories and methods for training deep SNNs with high performance in a systematic and comprehensive way, including theory fundamentals, spiking neuron models, advanced SNN models and residual architectures, software frameworks and neuromorphic hardware, applications, and future trends. The reviewed papers are collected at https://github.com/zhouchenlin2096/Awesome-Spiking-Neural-Networks
Although RDBs store vast amounts of rich, informative data spread across interconnected tables, the progress of predictive machine learning models as applied to such tasks arguably falls well behind advances in other domains such as computer vision or natural language processing. This deficit stems, at least in part, from the lack of established/public RDB benchmarks as needed for training and evaluation purposes. As a result, related model development thus far often defaults to tabular approaches trained on ubiquitous single-table benchmarks, or on the relational side, graph-based alternatives such as GNNs applied to a completely different set of graph datasets devoid of tabular characteristics. To more precisely target RDBs lying at the nexus of these two complementary regimes, we explore a broad class of baseline models predicated on: (i) converting multi-table datasets into graphs using various strategies equipped with efficient subsampling, while preserving tabular characteristics; and (ii) trainable models with well-matched inductive biases that output predictions based on these input subgraphs. Then, to address the dearth of suitable public benchmarks and reduce siloed comparisons, we assemble a diverse collection of (i) large-scale RDB datasets and (ii) coincident predictive tasks. From a delivery standpoint, we operationalize the above four dimensions (4D) of exploration within a unified, scalable open-source toolbox called 4DBInfer. We conclude by presenting evaluations using 4DBInfer, the results of which highlight the importance of considering each such dimension in the design of RDB predictive models, as well as the limitations of more naive approaches such as simply joining adjacent tables. Our source code is released at https://github.com/awslabs/multi-table-benchmark .
The fast growing capabilities of large-scale deep learning models, such as Bert, GPT and ViT, are revolutionizing the landscape of NLP, CV and many other domains. Training such models, however, poses an unprecedented demand for computing power, which incurs exponentially increasing energy cost and carbon dioxide emissions. It is thus critical to develop efficient training solutions to reduce the training costs. Motivated by a set of key observations of inter- and intra-layer similarities among feature maps and attentions that can be identified from typical training processes, we propose a multi-level framework for training acceleration. Specifically, the framework is based on three basic operators, Coalescing, De-coalescing and Interpolation, which can be orchestrated to build a multi-level training framework. The framework consists of a V-cycle training process, which progressively down- and up-scales the model size and projects the parameters between adjacent levels of models via coalescing and de-coalescing. The key idea is that a smaller model that can be trained for fast convergence and the trained parameters provides high-qualities intermediate solutions for the next level larger network. The interpolation operator is designed to break the symmetry of neurons incurred by de-coalescing for better convergence performance. Our experiments on transformer-based language models (e.g. Bert, GPT) as well as a vision model (e.g. DeiT) prove that the proposed framework reduces the computational cost by about 20% on training BERT/GPT-Base models and up to 51.6% on training the BERT-Large model while preserving the performance.
Generating radiology reports automatically reduces the workload of radiologists and helps the diagnoses of specific diseases. Many existing methods take this task as modality transfer process. However, since the key information related to disease accounts for a small proportion in both image and report, it is hard for the model to learn the latent relation between the radiology image and its report, thus failing to generate fluent and accurate radiology reports. To tackle this problem, we propose a memory-based cross-modal semantic alignment model (MCSAM) following an encoder-decoder paradigm. MCSAM includes a well initialized long-term clinical memory bank to learn disease-related representations as well as prior knowledge for different modalities to retrieve and use the retrieved memory to perform feature consolidation. To ensure the semantic consistency of the retrieved cross modal prior knowledge, a cross-modal semantic alignment module (SAM) is proposed. SAM is also able to generate semantic visual feature embeddings which can be added to the decoder and benefits report generation. More importantly, to memorize the state and additional information while generating reports with the decoder, we use learnable memory tokens which can be seen as prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed method which generates state-of-the-art performance on the MIMIC-CXR dataset.
Simultaneous functional PET/MR (sf-PET/MR) presents a cutting-edge multimodal neuroimaging technique. It provides an unprecedented opportunity for concurrently monitoring and integrating multifaceted brain networks built by spatiotemporally covaried metabolic activity, neural activity, and cerebral blood flow (perfusion). Albeit high scientific/clinical values, short in hardware accessibility of PET/MR hinders its applications, let alone modern AI-based PET/MR fusion models. Our objective is to develop a clinically feasible AI-based disease diagnosis model trained on comprehensive sf-PET/MR data with the power of, during inferencing, allowing single modality input (e.g., PET only) as well as enforcing multimodal-based accuracy. To this end, we propose MX-ARM, a multimodal MiXture-of-experts Alignment and Reconstruction Model. It is modality detachable and exchangeable, allocating different multi-layer perceptrons dynamically ("mixture of experts") through learnable weights to learn respective representations from different modalities. Such design will not sacrifice model performance in uni-modal situation. To fully exploit the inherent complex and nonlinear relation among modalities while producing fine-grained representations for uni-modal inference, we subsequently add a modal alignment module to line up a dominant modality (e.g., PET) with representations of auxiliary modalities (MR). We further adopt multimodal reconstruction to promote the quality of learned features. Experiments on precious multimodal sf-PET/MR data for Mild Cognitive Impairment diagnosis showcase the efficacy of our model toward clinically feasible precision medicine.
Spiking Transformers, which integrate Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with Transformer architectures, have attracted significant attention due to their potential for energy efficiency and high performance. However, existing models in this domain still suffer from suboptimal performance. We introduce several innovations to improve the performance: i) We propose a novel spike-form Q-K attention mechanism, tailored for SNNs, which efficiently models the importance of token or channel dimensions through binary vectors with linear complexity. ii) We incorporate the hierarchical structure, which significantly benefits the performance of both the brain and artificial neural networks, into spiking transformers to obtain multi-scale spiking representation. iii) We design a versatile and powerful patch embedding module with a deformed shortcut specifically for spiking transformers. Together, we develop QKFormer, a hierarchical spiking transformer based on Q-K attention with direct training. QKFormer shows significantly superior performance over existing state-of-the-art SNN models on various mainstream datasets. Notably, with comparable size to Spikformer (66.34 M, 74.81%), QKFormer (64.96 M) achieves a groundbreaking top-1 accuracy of 85.65% on ImageNet-1k, substantially outperforming Spikformer by 10.84%. To our best knowledge, this is the first time that directly training SNNs have exceeded 85% accuracy on ImageNet-1K. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/zhouchenlin2096/QKFormer
Automated X-ray image segmentation would accelerate research and development in diagnostic and interventional precision medicine. Prior efforts have contributed task-specific models capable of solving specific image analysis problems, but the utility of these models is restricted to their particular task domain, and expanding to broader use requires additional data, labels, and retraining efforts. Recently, foundation models (FMs) -- machine learning models trained on large amounts of highly variable data thus enabling broad applicability -- have emerged as promising tools for automated image analysis. Existing FMs for medical image analysis focus on scenarios and modalities where objects are clearly defined by visually apparent boundaries, such as surgical tool segmentation in endoscopy. X-ray imaging, by contrast, does not generally offer such clearly delineated boundaries or structure priors. During X-ray image formation, complex 3D structures are projected in transmission onto the imaging plane, resulting in overlapping features of varying opacity and shape. To pave the way toward an FM for comprehensive and automated analysis of arbitrary medical X-ray images, we develop FluoroSAM, a language-aligned variant of the Segment-Anything Model, trained from scratch on 1.6M synthetic X-ray images. FluoroSAM is trained on data including masks for 128 organ types and 464 non-anatomical objects, such as tools and implants. In real X-ray images of cadaveric specimens, FluoroSAM is able to segment bony anatomical structures based on text-only prompting with 0.51 and 0.79 DICE with point-based refinement, outperforming competing SAM variants for all structures. FluoroSAM is also capable of zero-shot generalization to segmenting classes beyond the training set thanks to its language alignment, which we demonstrate for full lung segmentation on real chest X-rays.
Multiple cameras can provide multi-view video coverage of a person. It is necessary to fuse multi-view data, e.g., for subsequent behavioral analysis, while such fusion often relies on calibration of cameras in traditional solutions. However, it is non-trivial to calibrate multiple cameras. In this work, we propose a method to reconstruct 3D human body from multiple uncalibrated camera views. First, we adopt a pre-trained human body encoder to process each individual camera view, such that human body models and parameters can be reconstructed for each view. Next, instead of simply averaging models across views, we train a network to determine the weights of individual views for their fusion, based on the parameters estimated for joints and hands of human body as well as camera positions. Further, we turn to the mesh surface of human body for dynamic fusion, such that facial expression can be seamlessly integrated into the model of human body. Our method has demonstrated superior performance in reconstructing human body upon two public datasets. More importantly, our method can flexibly support ad-hoc deployment of an arbitrary number of cameras, which has significant potential in related applications. We will release source code upon acceptance of the paper.