Abstract:Medical image segmentation is fundamental for computer-aided diagnostics, providing accurate delineation of anatomical structures and pathological regions. While common metrics such as Accuracy, DSC, IoU, and HD primarily quantify spatial agreement between predictions and ground-truth labels, they do not assess the calibration quality of segmentation models, which is crucial for clinical reliability. To address this limitation, we propose pixel-wise Expected Calibration Error (pECE), a novel metric that explicitly measures miscalibration at the pixel level, thereby ensuring both spatial precision and confidence reliability. We further introduce a morphological adaptation strategy that applies morphological operations to ground-truth masks before computing calibration losses, particularly benefiting margin-based losses such as Margin SVLS and NACL. Additionally, we present the Signed Distance Calibration Loss (SDC), which aligns boundary geometry with calibration objectives by penalizing discrepancies between predicted and ground-truth signed distance functions (SDFs). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only enhances segmentation performance but also improves calibration quality, yielding more trustworthy confidence estimates. Code is available at: https://github.com/EagleAdelaide/SDC-Loss.
Abstract:Kolmogorov Arnold Networks (KANs) are neural architectures inspired by the Kolmogorov Arnold representation theorem that leverage B Spline parameterizations for flexible, locally adaptive function approximation. Although KANs can capture complex nonlinearities beyond those modeled by standard MultiLayer Perceptrons (MLPs), they frequently exhibit miscalibrated confidence estimates manifesting as overconfidence in dense data regions and underconfidence in sparse areas. In this work, we systematically examine the impact of four critical hyperparameters including Layer Width, Grid Order, Shortcut Function, and Grid Range on the calibration of KANs. Furthermore, we introduce a novel TemperatureScaled Loss (TSL) that integrates a temperature parameter directly into the training objective, dynamically adjusting the predictive distribution during learning. Both theoretical analysis and extensive empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that TSL significantly reduces calibration errors, thereby improving the reliability of probabilistic predictions. Overall, our study provides actionable insights into the design of spline based neural networks and establishes TSL as a robust loss solution for enhancing calibration.
Abstract:Kolmogorov-Arnold Neural Networks (KANs) have gained significant attention in the machine learning community. However, their implementation often suffers from poor training stability and heavy trainable parameter. Furthermore, there is limited understanding of the behavior of the learned activation functions derived from B-splines. In this work, we analyze the behavior of KANs through the lens of spline knots and derive the lower and upper bound for the number of knots in B-spline-based KANs. To address existing limitations, we propose a novel Free Knots KAN that enhances the performance of the original KAN while reducing the number of trainable parameters to match the trainable parameter scale of standard Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). Additionally, we introduce new a training strategy to ensure $C^2$ continuity of the learnable spline, resulting in smoother activation compared to the original KAN and improve the training stability by range expansion. The proposed method is comprehensively evaluated on 8 datasets spanning various domains, including image, text, time series, multimodal, and function approximation tasks. The promising results demonstrates the feasibility of KAN-based network and the effectiveness of proposed method.
Abstract:Machine unlearning without access to real data distribution is challenging. The existing method based on data-free distillation achieved unlearning by filtering out synthetic samples containing forgetting information but struggled to distill the retaining-related knowledge efficiently. In this work, we analyze that such a problem is due to over-filtering, which reduces the synthesized retaining-related information. We propose a novel method, Inhibited Synthetic PostFilter (ISPF), to tackle this challenge from two perspectives: First, the Inhibited Synthetic, by reducing the synthesized forgetting information; Second, the PostFilter, by fully utilizing the retaining-related information in synthesized samples. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ISPF effectively tackles the challenge and outperforms existing methods.
Abstract:Uncertainty is a fundamental aspect of real-world scenarios, where perfect information is rarely available. Humans naturally develop complex internal models to navigate incomplete data and effectively respond to unforeseen or partially observed events. In machine learning, Focal Loss is commonly used to reduce misclassification rates by emphasizing hard-to-classify samples. However, it does not guarantee well-calibrated predicted probabilities and may result in models that are overconfident or underconfident. High calibration error indicates a misalignment between predicted probabilities and actual outcomes, affecting model reliability. This research introduces a novel loss function called Focal Calibration Loss (FCL), designed to improve probability calibration while retaining the advantages of Focal Loss in handling difficult samples. By minimizing the Euclidean norm through a strictly proper loss, FCL penalizes the instance-wise calibration error and constrains bounds. We provide theoretical validation for proposed method and apply it to calibrate CheXNet for potential deployment in web-based health-care systems. Extensive evaluations on various models and datasets demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance in both calibration and accuracy metrics.
Abstract:Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive performance in many pivotal web applications such as sensor data analysis. However, since LLMs are not designed for time series tasks, simpler models like linear regressions can often achieve comparable performance with far less complexity. In this study, we perform extensive experiments to assess the effectiveness of applying LLMs to key time series tasks, including forecasting, classification, imputation, and anomaly detection. We compare the performance of LLMs against simpler baseline models, such as single-layer linear models and randomly initialized LLMs. Our results reveal that LLMs offer minimal advantages for these core time series tasks and may even distort the temporal structure of the data. In contrast, simpler models consistently outperform LLMs while requiring far fewer parameters. Furthermore, we analyze existing reprogramming techniques and show, through data manifold analysis, that these methods fail to effectively align time series data with language and display pseudo-alignment behaviour in embedding space. Our findings suggest that the performance of LLM-based methods in time series tasks arises from the intrinsic characteristics and structure of time series data, rather than any meaningful alignment with the language model architecture.
Abstract:Drug-drug interaction (DDI) identification is a crucial aspect of pharmacology research. There are many DDI types (hundreds), and they are not evenly distributed with equal chance to occur. Some of the rarely occurred DDI types are often high risk and could be life-critical if overlooked, exemplifying the long-tailed distribution problem. Existing models falter against this distribution challenge and overlook the multi-faceted nature of drugs in DDI prediction. In this paper, a novel multi-modal deep learning-based framework, namely TFDM, is introduced to leverage multiple properties of a drug to achieve DDI classification. The proposed framework fuses multimodal features of drugs, including graph-based, molecular structure, Target and Enzyme, for DDI identification. To tackle the challenge posed by the distribution skewness across categories, a novel loss function called Tailed Focal Loss is introduced, aimed at further enhancing the model performance and address gradient vanishing problem of focal loss in extremely long-tailed dataset. Intensive experiments over 4 challenging long-tailed dataset demonstrate that the TFMD outperforms the most recent SOTA methods in long-tailed DDI classification tasks. The source code is released to reproduce our experiment results: https://github.com/IcurasLW/TFMD_Longtailed_DDI.git
Abstract:Irregular Time Series Data (IRTS) has shown increasing prevalence in real-world applications. We observed that IRTS can be divided into two specialized types: Natural Irregular Time Series (NIRTS) and Accidental Irregular Time Series (AIRTS). Various existing methods either ignore the impacts of irregular patterns or statically learn the irregular dynamics of NIRTS and AIRTS data and suffer from limited data availability due to the sparsity of IRTS. We proposed a novel transformer-based framework for general irregular time series data that treats IRTS from four views: Locality, Time, Spatio and Irregularity to motivate the data usage to the highest potential. Moreover, we design a sophisticated irregularity-gate mechanism to adaptively select task-relevant information from irregularity, which improves the generalization ability to various IRTS data. We implement extensive experiments to demonstrate the resistance of our work to three highly missing ratio datasets (88.4\%, 94.9\%, 60\% missing value) and investigate the significance of the irregularity information for both NIRTS and AIRTS by additional ablation study. We release our implementation in https://github.com/IcurasLW/MTSFormer-Irregular_Time_Series.git
Abstract:Code translation converts code from one programming language to another while maintaining its original functionality, which is crucial for software migration, system refactoring, and cross-platform development. Traditional rule-based methods rely on manually-written rules, which can be time-consuming and often result in less readable code. To overcome this, learning-based methods have been developed, leveraging parallel data to train models for automated code translation. More recently, the advance of Large Language Models (LLMs) further boosts learning-based code translation. Although promising, LLM-translated program still suffers from diverse quality issues (e.g., syntax errors and semantic errors). In particular, it can be challenging for LLMs to self-debug these errors when simply provided with the corresponding error messages. In this work, we propose a novel LLM-based multi-agent system TRANSAGENT, which enhances LLM-based code translation by fixing the syntax errors and semantic errors with the synergy between four LLM-based agents, including Initial Code Translator, Syntax Error Fixer, Code Aligner, and Semantic Error Fixer. The main insight of TRANSAGENT is to first localize the error code block in the target program based on the execution alignment between the target and source program, which can narrow down the fixing space and thus lower down the fixing difficulties. To evaluate TRANSAGENT, we first construct a new benchmark from recent programming tasks to mitigate the potential data leakage issue. On our benchmark, TRANSAGENT outperforms the latest LLM-based code translation technique UniTrans in both translation effectiveness and efficiency; additionally, our evaluation on different LLMs show the generalization of TRANSAGENT and our ablation study shows the contribution of each agent.
Abstract:Class Incremental Semantic Segmentation (CISS) aims to mitigate catastrophic forgetting by maintaining a balance between previously learned and newly introduced knowledge. Existing methods, primarily based on regularization techniques like knowledge distillation, help preserve old knowledge but often face challenges in effectively integrating new knowledge, resulting in limited overall improvement. Endpoints Weight Fusion (EWF) method, while simple, effectively addresses some of these limitations by dynamically fusing the model weights from previous steps with those from the current step, using a fusion parameter alpha determined by the relative number of previously known classes and newly introduced classes. However, the simplicity of the alpha calculation may limit its ability to fully capture the complexities of different task scenarios, potentially leading to suboptimal fusion outcomes. In this paper, we propose an enhanced approach called Adaptive Weight Fusion (AWF), which introduces an alternating training strategy for the fusion parameter, allowing for more flexible and adaptive weight integration. AWF achieves superior performance by better balancing the retention of old knowledge with the learning of new classes, significantly improving results on benchmark CISS tasks compared to the original EWF. And our experiment code will be released on Github.