Hierarchical Graph-Convolutional Variational AutoEncoding for Generative Modelling of Human Motion

Models of human motion commonly focus either on trajectory prediction or action classification but rarely both. The marked heterogeneity and intricate compositionality of human motion render each task vulnerable to the data degradation and distributional shift common to real-world scenarios. A sufficiently expressive generative model of action could in theory enable data conditioning and distributional resilience within a unified framework applicable to both tasks. Here we propose a novel architecture based on hierarchical variational autoencoders and deep graph convolutional neural networks for generating a holistic model of action over multiple time-scales. We show this Hierarchical Graph-convolutional Variational Autoencoder (HG-VAE) to be capable of generating coherent actions, detecting out-of-distribution data, and imputing missing data by gradient ascent on the model's posterior. Trained and evaluated on H3.6M and the largest collection of open source human motion data, AMASS, we show HG-VAE can facilitate downstream discriminative learning better than baseline models.

An artificial intelligence natural language processing pipeline for information extraction in neuroradiology

The use of electronic health records in medical research is difficult because of the unstructured format. Extracting information within reports and summarising patient presentations in a way amenable to downstream analysis would be enormously beneficial for operational and clinical research. In this work we present a natural language processing pipeline for information extraction of radiological reports in neurology. Our pipeline uses a hybrid sequence of rule-based and artificial intelligence models to accurately extract and summarise neurological reports. We train and evaluate a custom language model on a corpus of 150000 radiological reports from National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, London MRI imaging. We also present results for standard NLP tasks on domain-specific neuroradiology datasets. We show our pipeline, called `neuroNLP', can reliably extract clinically relevant information from these reports, enabling downstream modelling of reports and associated imaging on a heretofore unprecedented scale.

Generative Model-Enhanced Human Motion Prediction

The task of predicting human motion is complicated by the natural heterogeneity and compositionality of actions, necessitating robustness to distributional shifts as far as out-of-distribution (OoD). Here we formulate a new OoD benchmark based on the Human3.6M and CMU motion capture datasets, and introduce a hybrid framework for hardening discriminative architectures to OoD failure by augmenting them with a generative model. When applied to current state-of-the-art discriminative models, we show that the proposed approach improves OoD robustness without sacrificing in-distribution performance, and can facilitate model interpretability. We suggest human motion predictors ought to be constructed with OoD challenges in mind, and provide an extensible general framework for hardening diverse discriminative architectures to extreme distributional shift. The code is available at https://github.com/bouracha/OoDMotion.