11,052 research outputs found
Machine learning in solar physics
The application of machine learning in solar physics has the potential to
greatly enhance our understanding of the complex processes that take place in
the atmosphere of the Sun. By using techniques such as deep learning, we are
now in the position to analyze large amounts of data from solar observations
and identify patterns and trends that may not have been apparent using
traditional methods. This can help us improve our understanding of explosive
events like solar flares, which can have a strong effect on the Earth
environment. Predicting hazardous events on Earth becomes crucial for our
technological society. Machine learning can also improve our understanding of
the inner workings of the sun itself by allowing us to go deeper into the data
and to propose more complex models to explain them. Additionally, the use of
machine learning can help to automate the analysis of solar data, reducing the
need for manual labor and increasing the efficiency of research in this field.Comment: 100 pages, 13 figures, 286 references, accepted for publication as a
Living Review in Solar Physics (LRSP
Modular lifelong machine learning
Deep learning has drastically improved the state-of-the-art in many important fields, including computer vision and natural language processing (LeCun et al., 2015). However, it is expensive to train a deep neural network on a machine learning problem. The overall training cost further increases when one wants to solve additional problems. Lifelong machine learning (LML) develops algorithms that aim to efficiently learn to solve a sequence of problems, which become available one at a time. New problems are solved with less resources by transferring previously learned knowledge. At the same time, an LML algorithm needs to retain good performance on all encountered problems, thus avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Current approaches do not possess all the desired properties of an LML algorithm. First, they primarily focus on preventing catastrophic forgetting (Diaz-Rodriguez et al., 2018; Delange et al., 2021). As a result, they neglect some knowledge transfer properties. Furthermore, they assume that all problems in a sequence share the same input space. Finally, scaling these methods to a large sequence of problems remains a challenge.
Modular approaches to deep learning decompose a deep neural network into sub-networks, referred to as modules. Each module can then be trained to perform an atomic transformation, specialised in processing a distinct subset of inputs. This modular approach to storing knowledge makes it easy to only reuse the subset of modules which are useful for the task at hand.
This thesis introduces a line of research which demonstrates the merits of a modular approach to lifelong machine learning, and its ability to address the aforementioned shortcomings of other methods. Compared to previous work, we show that a modular approach can be used to achieve more LML properties than previously demonstrated. Furthermore, we develop tools which allow modular LML algorithms to scale in order to retain said properties on longer sequences of problems.
First, we introduce HOUDINI, a neurosymbolic framework for modular LML. HOUDINI represents modular deep neural networks as functional programs and accumulates a library of pre-trained modules over a sequence of problems. Given a new problem, we use program synthesis to select a suitable neural architecture, as well as a high-performing combination of pre-trained and new modules. We show that our approach has most of the properties desired from an LML algorithm. Notably, it can perform forward transfer, avoid negative transfer and prevent catastrophic forgetting, even across problems with disparate input domains and problems which require different neural architectures.
Second, we produce a modular LML algorithm which retains the properties of HOUDINI but can also scale to longer sequences of problems. To this end, we fix the choice of a neural architecture and introduce a probabilistic search framework, PICLE, for searching through different module combinations. To apply PICLE, we introduce two probabilistic models over neural modules which allows us to efficiently identify promising module combinations.
Third, we phrase the search over module combinations in modular LML as black-box optimisation, which allows one to make use of methods from the setting of hyperparameter optimisation (HPO). We then develop a new HPO method which marries a multi-fidelity approach with model-based optimisation. We demonstrate that this leads to improvement in anytime performance in the HPO setting and discuss how this can in turn be used to augment modular LML methods.
Overall, this thesis identifies a number of important LML properties, which have not all been attained in past methods, and presents an LML algorithm which can achieve all of them, apart from backward transfer
Segmentation of Pathology Images: A Deep Learning Strategy with Annotated Data
Cancer has significantly threatened human life and health for many years. In the clinic, histopathology image segmentation is the golden stand for evaluating the prediction of patient prognosis and treatment outcome. Generally, manually labelling tumour regions in hundreds of high-resolution histopathological images is time-consuming and expensive for pathologists. Recently, the advancements in hardware and computer vision have allowed deep-learning-based methods to become mainstream to segment tumours automatically, significantly reducing the workload of pathologists. However, most current methods rely on large-scale labelled histopathological images. Therefore, this research studies label-effective tumour segmentation methods using deep-learning paradigms to relieve the annotation limitations. Chapter 3 proposes an ensemble framework for fully-supervised tumour segmentation. Usually, the performance of an individual-trained network is limited by significant morphological variances in histopathological images. We propose a fully-supervised learning ensemble fusion model that uses both shallow and deep U-Nets, trained with images of different resolutions and subsets of images, for robust predictions of tumour regions. Noise elimination is achieved with Convolutional Conditional Random Fields. Two open datasets are used to evaluate the proposed method: the ACDC@LungHP challenge at ISBI2019 and the DigestPath challenge at MICCAI2019. With a dice coefficient of 79.7 %, the proposed method takes third place in ACDC@LungHP. In DigestPath 2019, the proposed method achieves a dice coefficient 77.3 %. Well-annotated images are an indispensable part of training fully-supervised segmentation strategies. However, large-scale histopathology images are hardly annotated finely in clinical practice. It is common for labels to be of poor quality or for only a few images to be manually marked by experts. Consequently, fully-supervised methods cannot perform well in these cases. Chapter 4 proposes a self-supervised contrast learning for tumour segmentation. A self-supervised cancer segmentation framework is proposed to reduce label dependency. An innovative contrastive learning scheme is developed to represent tumour features based on unlabelled images. Unlike a normal U-Net, the backbone is a patch-based segmentation network. Additionally, data augmentation and contrastive losses are applied to improve the discriminability of tumour features. A convolutional Conditional Random Field is used to smooth and eliminate noise. Three labelled, and fourteen unlabelled images are collected from a private skin cancer dataset called BSS. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better tumour segmentation performance than other popular self-supervised methods. However, by evaluated on the same public dataset as chapter 3, the proposed self-supervised method is hard to handle fine-grained segmentation around tumour boundaries compared to the supervised method we proposed. Chapter 5 proposes a sketch-based weakly-supervised tumour segmentation method. To segment tumour regions precisely with coarse annotations, a sketch-supervised method is proposed, containing a dual CNN-Transformer network and a global normalised class activation map. CNN-Transformer networks simultaneously model global and local tumour features. With the global normalised class activation map, a gradient-based tumour representation can be obtained from the dual network predictions. We invited experts to mark fine and coarse annotations in the private BSS and the public PAIP2019 datasets to facilitate reproducible performance comparisons. Using the BSS dataset, the proposed method achieves 76.686 % IOU and 86.6 % Dice scores, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the proposed method achieves a Dice gain of 8.372 % compared with U-Net on the PAIP2019 dataset. The thesis presents three approaches to segmenting cancers from histology images: fully-supervised, unsupervised, and weakly supervised methods. This research effectively segments tumour regions based on histopathological annotations and well-designed modules. Our studies comprehensively demonstrate label-effective automatic histopathological image segmentation. Experimental results prove that our works achieve state-of-the-art segmentation performances on private and public datasets. In the future, we plan to integrate more tumour feature representation technologies with other medical modalities and apply them to clinical research
Evaluation of different segmentation-based approaches for skin disorders from dermoscopic images
Treballs Finals de Grau d'Enginyeria Biomèdica. Facultat de Medicina i Ciències de la Salut. Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2022-2023. Tutor/Director: Sala Llonch, Roser, Mata Miquel, Christian, Munuera, JosepSkin disorders are the most common type of cancer in the world and the incident has been lately increasing over the past decades. Even with the most complex and advanced technologies, current image acquisition systems do not permit a reliable identification of the skin lesion by visual examination due to the challenging structure of the malignancy. This promotes the need for the implementation of automatic skin lesion segmentation methods in order to assist in physicians’ diagnostic when determining the lesion's region and to serve as a preliminary step for the classification of the skin lesion. Accurate and precise segmentation is crucial for a rigorous screening and monitoring of the disease's progression.
For the purpose of the commented concern, the present project aims to accomplish a state-of-the-art review about the most predominant conventional segmentation models for skin lesion segmentation, alongside with a market analysis examination. With the rise of automatic segmentation tools, a wide number of algorithms are currently being used, but many are the drawbacks when employing them for dermatological disorders due to the high-level presence of artefacts in the image acquired.
In light of the above, three segmentation techniques have been selected for the completion of the work: level set method, an algorithm combining GrabCut and k-means methods and an intensity automatic algorithm developed by Hospital Sant Joan de Déu de Barcelona research group. In addition, a validation of their performance is conducted for a further implementation of them in clinical training. The proposals, together with the got outcomes, have been accomplished by means of a publicly available skin lesion image database
The role of artificial intelligence-driven soft sensors in advanced sustainable process industries: a critical review
With the predicted depletion of natural resources and alarming environmental issues, sustainable development has become a popular as well as a much-needed concept in modern process industries. Hence, manufacturers are quite keen on adopting novel process monitoring techniques to enhance product quality and process efficiency while minimizing possible adverse environmental impacts. Hardware sensors are employed in process industries to aid process monitoring and control, but they are associated with many limitations such as disturbances to the process flow, measurement delays, frequent need for maintenance, and high capital costs. As a result, soft sensors have become an attractive alternative for predicting quality-related parameters that are ‘hard-to-measure’ using hardware sensors. Due to their promising features over hardware counterparts, they have been employed across different process industries. This article attempts to explore the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (Al)-driven soft sensors designed for process industries and their role in achieving the goal of sustainable development. First, a general introduction is given to soft sensors, their applications in different process industries, and their significance in achieving sustainable development goals. AI-based soft sensing algorithms are then introduced. Next, a discussion on how AI-driven soft sensors contribute toward different sustainable manufacturing strategies of process industries is provided. This is followed by a critical review of the most recent state-of-the-art AI-based soft sensors reported in the literature. Here, the use of powerful AI-based algorithms for addressing the limitations of traditional algorithms, that restrict the soft sensor performance is discussed. Finally, the challenges and limitations associated with the current soft sensor design, application, and maintenance aspects are discussed with possible future directions for designing more intelligent and smart soft sensing technologies to cater the future industrial needs
Introduction to Facial Micro Expressions Analysis Using Color and Depth Images: A Matlab Coding Approach (Second Edition, 2023)
The book attempts to introduce a gentle introduction to the field of Facial
Micro Expressions Recognition (FMER) using Color and Depth images, with the aid
of MATLAB programming environment. FMER is a subset of image processing and it
is a multidisciplinary topic to analysis. So, it requires familiarity with
other topics of Artifactual Intelligence (AI) such as machine learning, digital
image processing, psychology and more. So, it is a great opportunity to write a
book which covers all of these topics for beginner to professional readers in
the field of AI and even without having background of AI. Our goal is to
provide a standalone introduction in the field of MFER analysis in the form of
theorical descriptions for readers with no background in image processing with
reproducible Matlab practical examples. Also, we describe any basic definitions
for FMER analysis and MATLAB library which is used in the text, that helps
final reader to apply the experiments in the real-world applications. We
believe that this book is suitable for students, researchers, and professionals
alike, who need to develop practical skills, along with a basic understanding
of the field. We expect that, after reading this book, the reader feels
comfortable with different key stages such as color and depth image processing,
color and depth image representation, classification, machine learning, facial
micro-expressions recognition, feature extraction and dimensionality reduction.
The book attempts to introduce a gentle introduction to the field of Facial
Micro Expressions Recognition (FMER) using Color and Depth images, with the aid
of MATLAB programming environment.Comment: This is the second edition of the boo
CLR: Channel-wise Lightweight Reprogramming for Continual Learning
Continual learning aims to emulate the human ability to continually
accumulate knowledge over sequential tasks. The main challenge is to maintain
performance on previously learned tasks after learning new tasks, i.e., to
avoid catastrophic forgetting. We propose a Channel-wise Lightweight
Reprogramming (CLR) approach that helps convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
overcome catastrophic forgetting during continual learning. We show that a CNN
model trained on an old task (or self-supervised proxy task) could be
``reprogrammed" to solve a new task by using our proposed lightweight (very
cheap) reprogramming parameter. With the help of CLR, we have a better
stability-plasticity trade-off to solve continual learning problems: To
maintain stability and retain previous task ability, we use a common
task-agnostic immutable part as the shared ``anchor" parameter set. We then add
task-specific lightweight reprogramming parameters to reinterpret the outputs
of the immutable parts, to enable plasticity and integrate new knowledge. To
learn sequential tasks, we only train the lightweight reprogramming parameters
to learn each new task. Reprogramming parameters are task-specific and
exclusive to each task, which makes our method immune to catastrophic
forgetting. To minimize the parameter requirement of reprogramming to learn new
tasks, we make reprogramming lightweight by only adjusting essential kernels
and learning channel-wise linear mappings from anchor parameters to
task-specific domain knowledge. We show that, for general CNNs, the CLR
parameter increase is less than 0.6\% for any new task. Our method outperforms
13 state-of-the-art continual learning baselines on a new challenging sequence
of 53 image classification datasets. Code and data are available at
https://github.com/gyhandy/Channel-wise-Lightweight-ReprogrammingComment: ICCV 202
Colour technologies for content production and distribution of broadcast content
The requirement of colour reproduction has long been a priority driving the development of new colour imaging systems that maximise human perceptual plausibility. This thesis explores machine learning algorithms for colour processing to assist both content production and distribution. First, this research studies colourisation technologies with practical use cases in restoration and processing of archived content. The research targets practical deployable solutions, developing a cost-effective pipeline which integrates the activity of the producer into the processing workflow. In particular, a fully automatic image colourisation paradigm using Conditional GANs is proposed to improve content generalisation and colourfulness of existing baselines. Moreover, a more conservative solution is considered by providing references to guide the system towards more accurate colour predictions. A fast-end-to-end architecture is proposed to improve existing exemplar-based image colourisation methods while decreasing the complexity and runtime. Finally, the proposed image-based methods are integrated into a video colourisation pipeline. A general framework is proposed to reduce the generation of temporal flickering or propagation of errors when such methods are applied frame-to-frame. The proposed model is jointly trained to stabilise the input video and to cluster their frames with the aim of learning scene-specific modes. Second, this research explored colour processing technologies for content distribution with the aim to effectively deliver the processed content to the broad audience. In particular, video compression is tackled by introducing a novel methodology for chroma intra prediction based on attention models. Although the proposed architecture helped to gain control over the reference samples and better understand the prediction process, the complexity of the underlying neural network significantly increased the encoding and decoding time. Therefore, aiming at efficient deployment within the latest video coding standards, this work also focused on the simplification of the proposed architecture to obtain a more compact and explainable model
The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions
The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are
non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive
experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can
benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed,
including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture.
Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an
ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on
the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse
and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic,
multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is
required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To
address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline
ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications
and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user
interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps
of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact
of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial
Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on
its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies
to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions,
and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for
each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the
best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users,
scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse
ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution
- …