DREAMS: A python framework to train deep learning models with model card reporting for medical and health applications

Electroencephalography (EEG) data provides a non-invasive method for researchers and clinicians to observe brain activity in real time. The integration of deep learning techniques with EEG data has significantly improved the ability to identify meaningful patterns, leading to valuable insights for both clinical and research purposes. However, most of the frameworks so far, designed for EEG data analysis, are either too focused on pre-processing or in deep learning methods per, making their use for both clinician and developer communities problematic. Moreover, critical issues such as ethical considerations, biases, uncertainties, and the limitations inherent in AI models for EEG data analysis are frequently overlooked, posing challenges to the responsible implementation of these technologies. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive deep learning framework tailored for EEG data processing, model training and report generation. While constructed in way to be adapted and developed further by AI developers, it enables to report, through model cards, the outcome and specific information of use for both developers and clinicians. In this way, we discuss how this framework can, in the future, provide clinical researchers and developers with the tools needed to create transparent and accountable AI models for EEG data analysis and diagnosis.

Maximum Manifold Capacity Representations in State Representation Learning

The expanding research on manifold-based self-supervised learning (SSL) builds on the manifold hypothesis, which suggests that the inherent complexity of high-dimensional data can be unraveled through lower-dimensional manifold embeddings. Capitalizing on this, DeepInfomax with an unbalanced atlas (DIM-UA) has emerged as a powerful tool and yielded impressive results for state representations in reinforcement learning. Meanwhile, Maximum Manifold Capacity Representation (MMCR) presents a new frontier for SSL by optimizing class separability via manifold compression. However, MMCR demands extensive input views, resulting in significant computational costs and protracted pre-training durations. Bridging this gap, we present an innovative integration of MMCR into existing SSL methods, incorporating a discerning regularization strategy that enhances the lower bound of mutual information. We also propose a novel state representation learning method extending DIM-UA, embedding a nuclear norm loss to enforce manifold consistency robustly. On experimentation with the Atari Annotated RAM Interface, our method improves DIM-UA significantly with the same number of target encoding dimensions. The mean F1 score averaged over categories is 78% compared to 75% of DIM-UA. There are also compelling gains when implementing SimCLR and Barlow Twins. This supports our SSL innovation as a paradigm shift, enabling more nuanced high-dimensional data representations.

A Manifold Representation of the Key in Vision Transformers

Vision Transformers implement multi-head self-attention (MSA) via stacking multiple attention blocks. The query, key, and value are often intertwined and generated within those blocks via a single, shared linear transformation. This paper explores the concept of disentangling the key from the query and value, and adopting a manifold representation for the key. Our experiments reveal that decoupling and endowing the key with a manifold structure can enhance the model performance. Specifically, ViT-B exhibits a 0.87% increase in top-1 accuracy, while Swin-T sees a boost of 0.52% in top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-1K dataset, with eight charts in the manifold key. Our approach also yields positive results in object detection and instance segmentation tasks on the COCO dataset. Through detailed ablation studies, we establish that these performance gains are not merely due to the simplicity of adding more parameters and computations. Future research may investigate strategies for cutting the budget of such representations and aim for further performance improvements based on our findings.

Generalized Convergence Analysis of Tsetlin Machines: A Probabilistic Approach to Concept Learning

Tsetlin Machines (TMs) have garnered increasing interest for their ability to learn concepts via propositional formulas and their proven efficiency across various application domains. Despite this, the convergence proof for the TMs, particularly for the AND operator (\emph{conjunction} of literals), in the generalized case (inputs greater than two bits) remains an open problem. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting a comprehensive convergence analysis of Tsetlin automaton-based Machine Learning algorithms. We introduce a novel framework, referred to as Probabilistic Concept Learning (PCL), which simplifies the TM structure while incorporating dedicated feedback mechanisms and dedicated inclusion/exclusion probabilities for literals. Given $n$ features, PCL aims to learn a set of conjunction clauses $C_i$ each associated with a distinct inclusion probability $p_i$. Most importantly, we establish a theoretical proof confirming that, for any clause $C_k$, PCL converges to a conjunction of literals when $0.5<p_k<1$. This result serves as a stepping stone for future research on the convergence properties of Tsetlin automaton-based learning algorithms. Our findings not only contribute to the theoretical understanding of Tsetlin Machines but also have implications for their practical application, potentially leading to more robust and interpretable machine learning models.

State Representation Learning Using an Unbalanced Atlas

The manifold hypothesis posits that high-dimensional data often lies on a lower-dimensional manifold and that utilizing this manifold as the target space yields more efficient representations. While numerous traditional manifold-based techniques exist for dimensionality reduction, their application in self-supervised learning has witnessed slow progress. The recent MSIMCLR method combines manifold encoding with SimCLR but requires extremely low target encoding dimensions to outperform SimCLR, limiting its applicability. This paper introduces a novel learning paradigm using an unbalanced atlas (UA), capable of surpassing state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches. We meticulously investigated and engineered the DeepInfomax with an unbalanced atlas (DIM-UA) method by systematically adapting the Spatiotemporal DeepInfomax (ST-DIM) framework to align with our proposed UA paradigm, employing rigorous scientific methodologies throughout the process. The efficacy of DIM-UA is demonstrated through training and evaluation on the Atari Annotated RAM Interface (AtariARI) benchmark, a modified version of the Atari 2600 framework that produces annotated image samples for representation learning. The UA paradigm improves the existing algorithm significantly when the number of target encoding dimensions grows. For instance, the mean F1 score averaged over categories of DIM-UA is ~75% compared to ~70% of ST-DIM when using 16384 hidden units.

Ensuring Trustworthy Medical Artificial Intelligence through Ethical and Philosophical Principles

Artificial intelligence (AI) methods have great potential to revolutionize numerous medical care by enhancing the experience of medical experts and patients. AI based computer-assisted diagnosis tools can have a tremendous benefit if they can outperform or perform similarly to the level of a clinical expert. As a result, advanced healthcare services can be affordable in developing nations, and the problem of a lack of expert medical practitioners can be addressed. AI based tools can save time, resources, and overall cost for patient treatment. Furthermore, in contrast to humans, AI can uncover complex relations in the data from a large set of inputs and even lead to new evidence-based knowledge in medicine. However, integrating AI in healthcare raises several ethical and philosophical concerns, such as bias, transparency, autonomy, responsibility and accountability, which must be addressed before integrating such tools into clinical settings. In this article, we emphasize recent advances in AI-assisted medical image analysis, existing standards, and the significance of comprehending ethical issues and best practices for the applications of AI in clinical settings. We cover the technical and ethical challenges of AI and the implications of deploying AI in hospitals and public organizations. We also discuss promising key measures and techniques to address the ethical challenges, data scarcity, racial bias, lack of transparency, and algorithmic bias. Finally, we provide our recommendation and future directions for addressing the ethical challenges associated with AI in healthcare applications, with the goal of deploying AI into the clinical settings to make the workflow more efficient, accurate, accessible, transparent, and reliable for the patient worldwide.

Unsupervised Representation Learning in Partially Observable Atari Games

State representation learning aims to capture latent factors of an environment. Contrastive methods have performed better than generative models in previous state representation learning research. Although some researchers realize the connections between masked image modeling and contrastive representation learning, the effort is focused on using masks as an augmentation technique to represent the latent generative factors better. Partially observable environments in reinforcement learning have not yet been carefully studied using unsupervised state representation learning methods. In this article, we create an unsupervised state representation learning scheme for partially observable states. We conducted our experiment on a previous Atari 2600 framework designed to evaluate representation learning models. A contrastive method called Spatiotemporal DeepInfomax (ST-DIM) has shown state-of-the-art performance on this benchmark but remains inferior to its supervised counterpart. Our approach improves ST-DIM when the environment is not fully observable and achieves higher F1 scores and accuracy scores than the supervised learning counterpart. The mean accuracy score averaged over categories of our approach is ~66%, compared to ~38% of supervised learning. The mean F1 score is ~64% to ~33%.

Combining datasets to increase the number of samples and improve model fitting

For many use cases, combining information from different datasets can be of interest to improve a machine learning model's performance, especially when the number of samples from at least one of the datasets is small. However, a potential challenge in such cases is that the features from these datasets are not identical, even though there are some commonly shared features among the datasets. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel framework called Combine datasets based on Imputation (ComImp). In addition, we propose a variant of ComImp that uses Principle Component Analysis (PCA), PCA-ComImp in order to reduce dimension before combining datasets. This is useful when the datasets have a large number of features that are not shared between them. Furthermore, our framework can also be utilized for data preprocessing by imputing missing data, i.e., filling in the missing entries while combining different datasets. To illustrate the power of the proposed methods and their potential usages, we conduct experiments for various tasks: regression, classification, and for different data types: tabular data, time series data, when the datasets to be combined have missing data. We also investigate how the devised methods can be used with transfer learning to provide even further model training improvement. Our results indicate that the proposed methods are somewhat similar to transfer learning in that the merge can significantly improve the accuracy of a prediction model on smaller datasets. In addition, the methods can boost performance by a significant margin when combining small datasets together and can provide extra improvement when being used with transfer learning.

Towards the Neuroevolution of Low-level Artificial General Intelligence

In this work, we argue that the search for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) should start from a much lower level than human-level intelligence. The circumstances of intelligent behavior in nature resulted from an organism interacting with its surrounding environment, which could change over time and exert pressure on the organism to allow for learning of new behaviors or environment models. Our hypothesis is that learning occurs through interpreting sensory feedback when an agent acts in an environment. For that to happen, a body and a reactive environment are needed. We evaluate a method to evolve a biologically-inspired artificial neural network that learns from environment reactions named Neuroevolution of Artificial General Intelligence (NAGI), a framework for low-level AGI. This method allows the evolutionary complexification of a randomly-initialized spiking neural network with adaptive synapses, which controls agents instantiated in mutable environments. Such a configuration allows us to benchmark the adaptivity and generality of the controllers. The chosen tasks in the mutable environments are food foraging, emulation of logic gates, and cart-pole balancing. The three tasks are successfully solved with rather small network topologies and therefore it opens up the possibility of experimenting with more complex tasks and scenarios where curriculum learning is beneficial.

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Swin Transformer

Transformers are neural network models that utilize multiple layers of self-attention heads. Attention is implemented in transformers as the contextual embeddings of the 'key' and 'query'. Transformers allow the re-combination of attention information from different layers and the processing of all inputs at once, which are more convenient than recurrent neural networks when dealt with a large number of data. Transformers have exhibited great performances on natural language processing tasks in recent years. Meanwhile, there have been tremendous efforts to adapt transformers into other fields of machine learning, such as Swin Transformer and Decision Transformer. Swin Transformer is a promising neural network architecture that splits image pixels into small patches and applies local self-attention operations inside the (shifted) windows of fixed sizes. Decision Transformer has successfully applied transformers to off-line reinforcement learning and showed that random-walk samples from Atari games are sufficient to let an agent learn optimized behaviors. However, it is considerably more challenging to combine online reinforcement learning with transformers. In this article, we further explore the possibility of not modifying the reinforcement learning policy, but only replacing the convolutional neural network architecture with the self-attention architecture from Swin Transformer. Namely, we target at changing how an agent views the world, but not how an agent plans about the world. We conduct our experiment on 49 games in Arcade Learning Environment. The results show that using Swin Transformer in reinforcement learning achieves significantly higher evaluation scores across the majority of games in Arcade Learning Environment. Thus, we conclude that online reinforcement learning can benefit from exploiting self-attentions with spatial token embeddings.