High-Resolution Mammogram Synthesis using Progressive Generative Adversarial Networks

The ability to generate synthetic medical images is useful for data augmentation, domain transfer, and out-of-distribution detection. However, generating realistic, high-resolution medical images is challenging, particularly for Full Field Digital Mammograms (FFDM), due to the textural heterogeneity, fine structural details and specific tissue properties. In this paper, we explore the use of progressively trained generative adversarial networks (GANs) to synthesize mammograms, overcoming the underlying instabilities when training such adversarial models. This work is the first to show that generation of realistic synthetic medical images is feasible at up to 1280x1024 pixels, the highest resolution achieved for medical image synthesis, enabling visualizations within standard mammographic hanging protocols. We hope this work can serve as a useful guide and facilitate further research on GANs in the medical imaging domain

Smart, Sparse Contours to Represent and Edit Images

We study the problem of reconstructing an image from information stored at contour locations. We show that high-quality reconstructions with high fidelity to the source image can be obtained from sparse input, e.g., comprising less than $6\%$ of image pixels. This is a significant improvement over existing contour-based reconstruction methods that require much denser input to capture subtle texture information and to ensure image quality. Our model, based on generative adversarial networks, synthesizes texture and details in regions where no input information is provided. The semantic knowledge encoded into our model and the sparsity of the input allows to use contours as an intuitive interface for semantically-aware image manipulation: local edits in contour domain translate to long-range and coherent changes in pixel space. We can perform complex structural changes such as changing facial expression by simple edits of contours. Our experiments demonstrate that humans as well as a face recognition system mostly cannot distinguish between our reconstructions and the source images.Comment: Accepted to CVPR'18; Project page: contour2im.github.i

VR-Goggles for Robots: Real-to-sim Domain Adaptation for Visual Control

In this paper, we deal with the reality gap from a novel perspective, targeting transferring Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies learned in simulated environments to the real-world domain for visual control tasks. Instead of adopting the common solutions to the problem by increasing the visual fidelity of synthetic images output from simulators during the training phase, we seek to tackle the problem by translating the real-world image streams back to the synthetic domain during the deployment phase, to make the robot feel at home. We propose this as a lightweight, flexible, and efficient solution for visual control, as 1) no extra transfer steps are required during the expensive training of DRL agents in simulation; 2) the trained DRL agents will not be constrained to being deployable in only one specific real-world environment; 3) the policy training and the transfer operations are decoupled, and can be conducted in parallel. Besides this, we propose a simple yet effective shift loss that is agnostic to the downstream task, to constrain the consistency between subsequent frames which is important for consistent policy outputs. We validate the shift loss for artistic style transfer for videos and domain adaptation, and validate our visual control approach in indoor and outdoor robotics experiments.Comment: IEEE RA-L 2019 to appear. The first two authors contributed equally. Video and supplement file are available on the project page(https://goo.gl/KcvmRm

ACE: Adapting to Changing Environments for Semantic Segmentation

Deep neural networks exhibit exceptional accuracy when they are trained and tested on the same data distributions. However, neural classifiers are often extremely brittle when confronted with domain shift---changes in the input distribution that occur over time. We present ACE, a framework for semantic segmentation that dynamically adapts to changing environments over the time. By aligning the distribution of labeled training data from the original source domain with the distribution of incoming data in a shifted domain, ACE synthesizes labeled training data for environments as it sees them. This stylized data is then used to update a segmentation model so that it performs well in new environments. To avoid forgetting knowledge from past environments, we introduce a memory that stores feature statistics from previously seen domains. These statistics can be used to replay images in any of the previously observed domains, thus preventing catastrophic forgetting. In addition to standard batch training using stochastic gradient decent (SGD), we also experiment with fast adaptation methods based on adaptive meta-learning. Extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets from SYNTHIA, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach when adapting to a number of tasks

Applying Visual Domain Style Transfer and Texture Synthesis Techniques to Audio - Insights and Challenges

Style transfer is a technique for combining two images based on the activations and feature statistics in a deep learning neural network architecture. This paper studies the analogous task in the audio domain and takes a critical look at the problems that arise when adapting the original vision-based framework to handle spectrogram representations. We conclude that CNN architectures with features based on 2D representations and convolutions are better suited for visual images than for time-frequency representations of audio. Despite the awkward fit, experiments show that the Gram matrix determined "style" for audio is more closely aligned with timbral signatures without temporal structure whereas network layer activity determining audio "content" seems to capture more of the pitch and rhythmic structures. We shed insight on several reasons for the domain differences with illustrative examples. We motivate the use of several types of one-dimensional CNNs that generate results that are better aligned with intuitive notions of audio texture than those based on existing architectures built for images. These ideas also prompt an exploration of audio texture synthesis with architectural variants for extensions to infinite textures, multi-textures, parametric control of receptive fields and the constant-Q transform as an alternative frequency scaling for the spectrogram.Comment: Post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article to be published in Neural Computing and Applications. 11 figure

A Robust Approach for Securing Audio Classification Against Adversarial Attacks

Adversarial audio attacks can be considered as a small perturbation unperceptive to human ears that is intentionally added to the audio signal and causes a machine learning model to make mistakes. This poses a security concern about the safety of machine learning models since the adversarial attacks can fool such models toward the wrong predictions. In this paper we first review some strong adversarial attacks that may affect both audio signals and their 2D representations and evaluate the resiliency of the most common machine learning model, namely deep learning models and support vector machines (SVM) trained on 2D audio representations such as short time Fourier transform (STFT), discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and cross recurrent plot (CRP) against several state-of-the-art adversarial attacks. Next, we propose a novel approach based on pre-processed DWT representation of audio signals and SVM to secure audio systems against adversarial attacks. The proposed architecture has several preprocessing modules for generating and enhancing spectrograms including dimension reduction and smoothing. We extract features from small patches of the spectrograms using speeded up robust feature (SURF) algorithm which are further used to generate a codebook using the K-Means++ algorithm. Finally, codewords are used to train a SVM on the codebook of the SURF-generated vectors. All these steps yield to a novel approach for audio classification that provides a good trade-off between accuracy and resilience. Experimental results on three environmental sound datasets show the competitive performance of proposed approach compared to the deep neural networks both in terms of accuracy and robustness against strong adversarial attacks.Comment: Paper Accepted for Publication in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Securit

ShapeAdv: Generating Shape-Aware Adversarial 3D Point Clouds

We introduce ShapeAdv, a novel framework to study shape-aware adversarial perturbations that reflect the underlying shape variations (e.g., geometric deformations and structural differences) in the 3D point cloud space. We develop shape-aware adversarial 3D point cloud attacks by leveraging the learned latent space of a point cloud auto-encoder where the adversarial noise is applied in the latent space. Specifically, we propose three different variants including an exemplar-based one by guiding the shape deformation with auxiliary data, such that the generated point cloud resembles the shape morphing between objects in the same category. Different from prior works, the resulting adversarial 3D point clouds reflect the shape variations in the 3D point cloud space while still being close to the original one. In addition, experimental evaluations on the ModelNet40 benchmark demonstrate that our adversaries are more difficult to defend with existing point cloud defense methods and exhibit a higher attack transferability across classifiers. Our shape-aware adversarial attacks are orthogonal to existing point cloud based attacks and shed light on the vulnerability of 3D deep neural networks.Comment: 3D Point Clouds, Adversarial Learnin

Cross-Resolution Person Re-identification with Deep Antithetical Learning

Images with different resolutions are ubiquitous in public person re-identification (ReID) datasets and real-world scenes, it is thus crucial for a person ReID model to handle the image resolution variations for improving its generalization ability. However, most existing person ReID methods pay little attention to this resolution discrepancy problem. One paradigm to deal with this problem is to use some complicated methods for mapping all images into an artificial image space, which however will disrupt the natural image distribution and requires heavy image preprocessing. In this paper, we analyze the deficiencies of several widely-used objective functions handling image resolution discrepancies and propose a new framework called deep antithetical learning that directly learns from the natural image space rather than creating an arbitrary one. We first quantify and categorize original training images according to their resolutions. Then we create an antithetical training set and make sure that original training images have counterparts with antithetical resolutions in this new set. At last, a novel Contrastive Center Loss(CCL) is proposed to learn from images with different resolutions without being interfered by their resolution discrepancies. Extensive experimental analyses and evaluations indicate that the proposed framework, even using a vanilla deep ReID network, exhibits remarkable performance improvements. Without bells and whistles, our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin

Dynamic-Net: Tuning the Objective Without Re-training for Synthesis Tasks

One of the key ingredients for successful optimization of modern CNNs is identifying a suitable objective. To date, the objective is fixed a-priori at training time, and any variation to it requires re-training a new network. In this paper we present a first attempt at alleviating the need for re-training. Rather than fixing the network at training time, we train a "Dynamic-Net" that can be modified at inference time. Our approach considers an "objective-space" as the space of all linear combinations of two objectives, and the Dynamic-Net is emulating the traversing of this objective-space at test-time, without any further training. We show that this upgrades pre-trained networks by providing an out-of-learning extension, while maintaining the performance quality. The solution we propose is fast and allows a user to interactively modify the network, in real-time, in order to obtain the result he/she desires. We show the benefits of such an approach via several different applications.Comment: version updat

Energy-Efficient Hybrid Stochastic-Binary Neural Networks for Near-Sensor Computing

Recent advances in neural networks (NNs) exhibit unprecedented success at transforming large, unstructured data streams into compact higher-level semantic information for tasks such as handwriting recognition, image classification, and speech recognition. Ideally, systems would employ near-sensor computation to execute these tasks at sensor endpoints to maximize data reduction and minimize data movement. However, near- sensor computing presents its own set of challenges such as operating power constraints, energy budgets, and communication bandwidth capacities. In this paper, we propose a stochastic- binary hybrid design which splits the computation between the stochastic and binary domains for near-sensor NN applications. In addition, our design uses a new stochastic adder and multiplier that are significantly more accurate than existing adders and multipliers. We also show that retraining the binary portion of the NN computation can compensate for precision losses introduced by shorter stochastic bit-streams, allowing faster run times at minimal accuracy losses. Our evaluation shows that our hybrid stochastic-binary design can achieve 9.8x energy efficiency savings, and application-level accuracies within 0.05% compared to conventional all-binary designs.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, Design, Automata and Test in Europe (DATE) 201