EEG-DIF: Early Warning of Epileptic Seizures through Generative Diffusion Model-based Multi-channel EEG Signals Forecasting

Multi-channel EEG signals are commonly used for the diagnosis and assessment of diseases such as epilepsy. Currently, various EEG diagnostic algorithms based on deep learning have been developed. However, most research efforts focus solely on diagnosing and classifying current signal data but do not consider the prediction of future trends for early warning. Additionally, since multi-channel EEG can be essentially regarded as the spatio-temporal signal data received by detectors at different locations in the brain, how to construct spatio-temporal information representations of EEG signals to facilitate future trend prediction for multi-channel EEG becomes an important problem. This study proposes a multi-signal prediction algorithm based on generative diffusion models (EEG-DIF), which transforms the multi-signal forecasting task into an image completion task, allowing for comprehensive representation and learning of the spatio-temporal correlations and future developmental patterns of multi-channel EEG signals. Here, we employ a publicly available epilepsy EEG dataset to construct and validate the EEG-DIF. The results demonstrate that our method can accurately predict future trends for multi-channel EEG signals simultaneously. Furthermore, the early warning accuracy for epilepsy seizures based on the generated EEG data reaches 0.89. In general, EEG-DIF provides a novel approach for characterizing multi-channel EEG signals and an innovative early warning algorithm for epilepsy seizures, aiding in optimizing and enhancing the clinical diagnosis process. The code is available at https://github.com/JZK00/EEG-DIF.

TARGO: Benchmarking Target-driven Object Grasping under Occlusions

Recent advances in predicting 6D grasp poses from a single depth image have led to promising performance in robotic grasping. However, previous grasping models face challenges in cluttered environments where nearby objects impact the target object's grasp. In this paper, we first establish a new benchmark dataset for TARget-driven Grasping under Occlusions, named TARGO. We make the following contributions: 1) We are the first to study the occlusion level of grasping. 2) We set up an evaluation benchmark consisting of large-scale synthetic data and part of real-world data, and we evaluated five grasp models and found that even the current SOTA model suffers when the occlusion level increases, leaving grasping under occlusion still a challenge. 3) We also generate a large-scale training dataset via a scalable pipeline, which can be used to boost the performance of grasping under occlusion and generalized to the real world. 4) We further propose a transformer-based grasping model involving a shape completion module, termed TARGO-Net, which performs most robustly as occlusion increases. Our benchmark dataset can be found at https://TARGO-benchmark.github.io/.

Increasing SAM Zero-Shot Performance on Multimodal Medical Images Using GPT-4 Generated Descriptive Prompts Without Human Annotation

This study develops and evaluates a novel multimodal medical image zero-shot segmentation algorithm named Text-Visual-Prompt SAM (TV-SAM) without any manual annotations. TV-SAM incorporates and integrates large language model GPT-4, Vision Language Model GLIP, and Segment Anything Model (SAM), to autonomously generate descriptive text prompts and visual bounding box prompts from medical images, thereby enhancing SAM for zero-shot segmentation. Comprehensive evaluations are implemented on seven public datasets encompassing eight imaging modalities to demonstrate that TV-SAM can effectively segment unseen targets across various modalities without additional training, significantly outperforming SAM AUTO and GSAM, closely matching the performance of SAM BBOX with gold standard bounding box prompts, and surpassing the state-of-the-art on specific datasets like ISIC and WBC. The study indicates that TV-SAM serves as an effective multimodal medical image zero-shot segmentation algorithm, highlighting the significant contribution of GPT-4 to zero-shot segmentation. By integrating foundational models such as GPT-4, GLIP, and SAM, it could enhance the capability to address complex problems in specialized domains. The code is available at: https://github.com/JZK00/TV-SAM.

Edge Generation Scheduling for DAG Tasks using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Directed acyclic graph (DAG) tasks are currently adopted in the real-time domain to model complex applications from the automotive, avionics, and industrial domain that implement their functionalities through chains of intercommunicating tasks. This paper studies the problem of scheduling real-time DAG tasks by presenting a novel schedulability test based on the concept of trivial schedulability. Using this schedulability test, we propose a new DAG scheduling framework (edge generation scheduling -- EGS) that attempts to minimize the DAG width by iteratively generating edges while guaranteeing the deadline constraint. We study how to efficiently solve the problem of generating edges by developing a deep reinforcement learning algorithm combined with a graph representation neural network to learn an efficient edge generation policy for EGS. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing it with state-of-the-art DAG scheduling heuristics and an optimal mixed-integer linear programming baseline. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art by requiring fewer processors to schedule the same DAG tasks.

ConES: Concept Embedding Search for Parameter Efficient Tuning Large Vision Language Models

Large pre-trained vision-language models have shown great prominence in transferring pre-acquired knowledge to various domains and downstream tasks with appropriate prompting or tuning. Existing prevalent tuning methods can be generally categorized into three genres: 1) prompt engineering by creating suitable prompt texts, which is time-consuming and requires domain expertise; 2) or simply fine-tuning the whole model, which is extremely inefficient; 3) prompt tuning through parameterized prompt embeddings with the text encoder. Nevertheless, all methods rely on the text encoder for bridging the modality gap between vision and language. In this work, we question the necessity of the cumbersome text encoder for a more lightweight and efficient tuning paradigm as well as more representative prompt embeddings closer to the image representations. To achieve this, we propose a Concept Embedding Search (ConES) approach by optimizing prompt embeddings -- without the need of the text encoder -- to capture the 'concept' of the image modality through a variety of task objectives. By dropping the text encoder, we are able to significantly speed up the learning process, \eg, from about an hour to just ten minutes in our experiments for personalized text-to-image generation without impairing the generation quality. Moreover, our proposed approach is orthogonal to current existing tuning methods since the searched concept embeddings can be further utilized in the next stage of fine-tuning the pre-trained large models for boosting performance. Extensive experiments show that our approach can beat the prompt tuning and textual inversion methods in a variety of downstream tasks including objection detection, instance segmentation, and image generation. Our approach also shows better generalization capability for unseen concepts in specialized domains, such as the medical domain.

SAM on Medical Images: A Comprehensive Study on Three Prompt Modes

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) made an eye-catching debut recently and inspired many researchers to explore its potential and limitation in terms of zero-shot generalization capability. As the first promptable foundation model for segmentation tasks, it was trained on a large dataset with an unprecedented number of images and annotations. This large-scale dataset and its promptable nature endow the model with strong zero-shot generalization. Although the SAM has shown competitive performance on several datasets, we still want to investigate its zero-shot generalization on medical images. As we know, the acquisition of medical image annotation usually requires a lot of effort from professional practitioners. Therefore, if there exists a foundation model that can give high-quality mask prediction simply based on a few point prompts, this model will undoubtedly become the game changer for medical image analysis. To evaluate whether SAM has the potential to become the foundation model for medical image segmentation tasks, we collected more than 12 public medical image datasets that cover various organs and modalities. We also explore what kind of prompt can lead to the best zero-shot performance with different modalities. Furthermore, we find that a pattern shows that the perturbation of the box size will significantly change the prediction accuracy. Finally, Extensive experiments show that the predicted mask quality varied a lot among different datasets. And providing proper prompts, such as bounding boxes, to the SAM will significantly increase its performance.

Towards General Purpose Medical AI: Continual Learning Medical Foundation Model

Inevitable domain and task discrepancies in real-world scenarios can impair the generalization performance of the pre-trained deep models for medical data. Therefore, we audaciously propose that we should build a general-purpose medical AI system that can be seamlessly adapted to downstream domains/tasks. Since the domain/task adaption procedures usually involve additional labeling work for the target data, designing a data-efficient adaption algorithm is desired to save the cost of transferring the learned knowledge. Our recent work found that vision-language models (VLMs) are efficient learners with extraordinary cross-domain ability. Therefore, in this work, we further explore the possibility of leveraging pre-trained VLMs as medical foundation models for building general-purpose medical AI, where we thoroughly investigate three machine-learning paradigms, i.e., domain/task-specialized learning, joint learning, and continual learning, for training the VLMs and evaluate their generalization performance on cross-domain and cross-task test sets. To alleviate the catastrophic forgetting during sequential training, we employ rehearsal learning and receive a sharp boost in terms of generalization capability. In a nutshell, our empirical evidence suggests that continual learning may be a practical and efficient learning paradigm for the medical foundation model. And we hope researchers can use our empirical evidence as basement to further explore the path toward medical foundation model.

FADO: Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional Support Conversation (ESConv) aims to reduce help-seekers'emotional distress with the supportive strategy and response. It is essential for the supporter to select an appropriate strategy with the feedback of the help-seeker (e.g., emotion change during dialog turns, etc) in ESConv. However, previous methods mainly focus on the dialog history to select the strategy and ignore the help-seeker's feedback, leading to the wrong and user-irrelevant strategy prediction. In addition, these approaches only model the context-to-strategy flow and pay less attention to the strategy-to-context flow that can focus on the strategy-related context for generating the strategy-constrain response. In this paper, we propose a Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network (FADO) to make a strategy schedule and generate the supportive response. The core module in FADO consists of a dual-level feedback strategy selector and a double control reader. Specifically, the dual-level feedback strategy selector leverages the turn-level and conversation-level feedback to encourage or penalize strategies. The double control reader constructs the novel strategy-to-context flow for generating the strategy-constrain response. Furthermore, a strategy dictionary is designed to enrich the semantic information of the strategy and improve the quality of strategy-constrain response. Experimental results on ESConv show that the proposed FADO has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both strategy selection and response generation. Our code is available at https://github/after/reviewing.

Medical Image Understanding with Pretrained Vision Language Models: A Comprehensive Study

The large-scale pre-trained vision language models (VLM) have shown remarkable domain transfer capability on natural images. However, it remains unknown whether this capability can also apply to the medical image domain. This paper thoroughly studies the knowledge transferability of pre-trained VLMs to the medical domain, where we show that well-designed medical prompts are the key to elicit knowledge from pre-trained VLMs. We demonstrate that by prompting with expressive attributes that are shared between domains, the VLM can carry the knowledge across domains and improve its generalization. This mechanism empowers VLMs to recognize novel objects with fewer or without image samples. Furthermore, to avoid the laborious manual designing process, we develop three approaches for automatic generation of medical prompts, which can inject expert-level medical knowledge and image-specific information into the prompts for fine-grained grounding. We conduct extensive experiments on thirteen different medical datasets across various modalities, showing that our well-designed prompts greatly improve the zero-shot performance compared to the default prompts, and our fine-tuned models surpass the supervised models by a significant margin.