Many-MobileNet: Multi-Model Augmentation for Robust Retinal Disease Classification

In this work, we propose Many-MobileNet, an efficient model fusion strategy for retinal disease classification using lightweight CNN architecture. Our method addresses key challenges such as overfitting and limited dataset variability by training multiple models with distinct data augmentation strategies and different model complexities. Through this fusion technique, we achieved robust generalization in data-scarce domains while balancing computational efficiency with feature extraction capabilities.

Geographical Information Alignment Boosts Traffic Analysis via Transpose Cross-attention

Traffic accident prediction is crucial for enhancing road safety and mitigating congestion, and recent Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promise in modeling the inherent graph-based traffic data. However, existing GNN- based approaches often overlook or do not explicitly exploit geographic position information, which often plays a critical role in understanding spatial dependencies. This is also aligned with our observation, where accident locations are often highly relevant. To address this issue, we propose a plug-in-and-play module for common GNN frameworks, termed Geographic Information Alignment (GIA). This module can efficiently fuse the node feature and geographic position information through a novel Transpose Cross-attention mechanism. Due to the large number of nodes for traffic data, the conventional cross-attention mechanism performing the node-wise alignment may be infeasible in computation-limited resources. Instead, we take the transpose operation for Query, Key, and Value in the Cross-attention mechanism, which substantially reduces the computation cost while maintaining sufficient information. Experimental results for both traffic occurrence prediction and severity prediction (severity levels based on the interval of recorded crash counts) on large-scale city-wise datasets confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method. For example, our method can obtain gains ranging from 1.3% to 10.9% in F1 score and 0.3% to 4.8% in AUC.

RobustFormer: Noise-Robust Pre-training for images and videos

While deep learning models are powerful tools that revolutionized many areas, they are also vulnerable to noise as they rely heavily on learning patterns and features from the exact details of the clean data. Transformers, which have become the backbone of modern vision models, are no exception. Current Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) based methods do not benefit from masked autoencoder (MAE) pre-training since the inverse DWT (iDWT) introduced in these approaches is computationally inefficient and lacks compatibility with video inputs in transformer architectures. In this work, we present RobustFormer, a method that overcomes these limitations by enabling noise-robust pre-training for both images and videos; improving the efficiency of DWT-based methods by removing the need for computationally iDWT steps and simplifying the attention mechanism. To our knowledge, the proposed method is the first DWT-based method compatible with video inputs and masked pre-training. Our experiments show that MAE-based pre-training allows us to bypass the iDWT step, greatly reducing computation. Through extensive tests on benchmark datasets, RobustFormer achieves state-of-the-art results for both image and video tasks.

Enhancing Graph Neural Networks in Large-scale Traffic Incident Analysis with Concurrency Hypothesis

Despite recent progress in reducing road fatalities, the persistently high rate of traffic-related deaths highlights the necessity for improved safety interventions. Leveraging large-scale graph-based nationwide road network data across 49 states in the USA, our study first posits the Concurrency Hypothesis from intuitive observations, suggesting a significant likelihood of incidents occurring at neighboring nodes within the road network. To quantify this phenomenon, we introduce two novel metrics, Average Neighbor Crash Density (ANCD) and Average Neighbor Crash Continuity (ANCC), and subsequently employ them in statistical tests to validate the hypothesis rigorously. Building upon this foundation, we propose the Concurrency Prior (CP) method, a powerful approach designed to enhance the predictive capabilities of general Graph Neural Network (GNN) models in semi-supervised traffic incident prediction tasks. Our method allows GNNs to incorporate concurrent incident information, as mentioned in the hypothesis, via tokenization with negligible extra parameters. The extensive experiments, utilizing real-world data across states and cities in the USA, demonstrate that integrating CP into 12 state-of-the-art GNN architectures leads to significant improvements, with gains ranging from 3% to 13% in F1 score and 1.3% to 9% in AUC metrics. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/Incident-GNN-CP.

RBAD: A Dataset and Benchmark for Retinal Vessels Branching Angle Detection

Detecting retinal image analysis, particularly the geometrical features of branching points, plays an essential role in diagnosing eye diseases. However, existing methods used for this purpose often are coarse-level and lack fine-grained analysis for efficient annotation. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes a novel method for detecting retinal branching angles using a self-configured image processing technique. Additionally, we offer an open-source annotation tool and a benchmark dataset comprising 40 images annotated with retinal branching angles. Our methodology for retinal branching angle detection and calculation is detailed, followed by a benchmark analysis comparing our method with previous approaches. The results indicate that our method is robust under various conditions with high accuracy and efficiency, which offers a valuable instrument for ophthalmic research and clinical applications.

DGR-MIL: Exploring Diverse Global Representation in Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification

Multiple instance learning (MIL) stands as a powerful approach in weakly supervised learning, regularly employed in histological whole slide image (WSI) classification for detecting tumorous lesions. However, existing mainstream MIL methods focus on modeling correlation between instances while overlooking the inherent diversity among instances. However, few MIL methods have aimed at diversity modeling, which empirically show inferior performance but with a high computational cost. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel MIL aggregation method based on diverse global representation (DGR-MIL), by modeling diversity among instances through a set of global vectors that serve as a summary of all instances. First, we turn the instance correlation into the similarity between instance embeddings and the predefined global vectors through a cross-attention mechanism. This stems from the fact that similar instance embeddings typically would result in a higher correlation with a certain global vector. Second, we propose two mechanisms to enforce the diversity among the global vectors to be more descriptive of the entire bag: (i) positive instance alignment and (ii) a novel, efficient, and theoretically guaranteed diversification learning paradigm. Specifically, the positive instance alignment module encourages the global vectors to align with the center of positive instances (e.g., instances containing tumors in WSI). To further diversify the global representations, we propose a novel diversification learning paradigm leveraging the determinantal point process. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art MIL aggregation models by a substantial margin on the CAMELYON-16 and the TCGA-lung cancer datasets. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ChongQingNoSubway/DGR-MIL}.

SelfReg-UNet: Self-Regularized UNet for Medical Image Segmentation

Since its introduction, UNet has been leading a variety of medical image segmentation tasks. Although numerous follow-up studies have also been dedicated to improving the performance of standard UNet, few have conducted in-depth analyses of the underlying interest pattern of UNet in medical image segmentation. In this paper, we explore the patterns learned in a UNet and observe two important factors that potentially affect its performance: (i) irrelative feature learned caused by asymmetric supervision; (ii) feature redundancy in the feature map. To this end, we propose to balance the supervision between encoder and decoder and reduce the redundant information in the UNet. Specifically, we use the feature map that contains the most semantic information (i.e., the last layer of the decoder) to provide additional supervision to other blocks to provide additional supervision and reduce feature redundancy by leveraging feature distillation. The proposed method can be easily integrated into existing UNet architecture in a plug-and-play fashion with negligible computational cost. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method consistently improves the performance of standard UNets on four medical image segmentation datasets. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ChongQingNoSubway/SelfReg-UNet}

TimeMIL: Advancing Multivariate Time Series Classification via a Time-aware Multiple Instance Learning

Deep neural networks, including transformers and convolutional neural networks, have significantly improved multivariate time series classification (MTSC). However, these methods often rely on supervised learning, which does not fully account for the sparsity and locality of patterns in time series data (e.g., diseases-related anomalous points in ECG). To address this challenge, we formally reformulate MTSC as a weakly supervised problem, introducing a novel multiple-instance learning (MIL) framework for better localization of patterns of interest and modeling time dependencies within time series. Our novel approach, TimeMIL, formulates the temporal correlation and ordering within a time-aware MIL pooling, leveraging a tokenized transformer with a specialized learnable wavelet positional token. The proposed method surpassed 26 recent state-of-the-art methods, underscoring the effectiveness of the weakly supervised TimeMIL in MTSC.

Imaging Signal Recovery Using Neural Network Priors Under Uncertain Forward Model Parameters

Inverse imaging problems (IIPs) arise in various applications, with the main objective of reconstructing an image from its compressed measurements. This problem is often ill-posed for being under-determined with multiple interchangeably consistent solutions. The best solution inherently depends on prior knowledge or assumptions, such as the sparsity of the image. Furthermore, the reconstruction process for most IIPs relies significantly on the imaging (i.e. forward model) parameters, which might not be fully known, or the measurement device may undergo calibration drifts. These uncertainties in the forward model create substantial challenges, where inaccurate reconstructions usually happen when the postulated parameters of the forward model do not fully match the actual ones. In this work, we devoted to tackling accurate reconstruction under the context of a set of possible forward model parameters that exist. Here, we propose a novel Moment-Aggregation (MA) framework that is compatible with the popular IIP solution by using a neural network prior. Specifically, our method can reconstruct the signal by considering all candidate parameters of the forward model simultaneously during the update of the neural network. We theoretically demonstrate the convergence of the MA framework, which has a similar complexity with reconstruction under the known forward model parameters. Proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate that the proposed MA achieves performance comparable to the forward model with the known precise parameter in reconstruction across both compressive sensing and phase retrieval applications, with a PSNR gap of 0.17 to 1.94 over various datasets, including MNIST, X-ray, Glas, and MoNuseg. This highlights our method's significant potential in reconstruction under an uncertain forward model.

Motor Focus: Ego-Motion Prediction with All-Pixel Matching

Motion analysis plays a critical role in various applications, from virtual reality and augmented reality to assistive visual navigation. Traditional self-driving technologies, while advanced, typically do not translate directly to pedestrian applications due to their reliance on extensive sensor arrays and non-feasible computational frameworks. This highlights a significant gap in applying these solutions to human users since human navigation introduces unique challenges, including the unpredictable nature of human movement, limited processing capabilities of portable devices, and the need for directional responsiveness due to the limited perception range of humans. In this project, we introduce an image-only method that applies motion analysis using optical flow with ego-motion compensation to predict Motor Focus-where and how humans or machines focus their movement intentions. Meanwhile, this paper addresses the camera shaking issue in handheld and body-mounted devices which can severely degrade performance and accuracy, by applying a Gaussian aggregation to stabilize the predicted motor focus area and enhance the prediction accuracy of movement direction. This also provides a robust, real-time solution that adapts to the user's immediate environment. Furthermore, in the experiments part, we show the qualitative analysis of motor focus estimation between the conventional dense optical flow-based method and the proposed method. In quantitative tests, we show the performance of the proposed method on a collected small dataset that is specialized for motor focus estimation tasks.