FairAdaBN: Mitigating unfairness with adaptive batch normalization and its application to dermatological disease classification

Deep learning is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in medical research and applications while involving sensitive information and even critical diagnosis decisions. Researchers observe a significant performance disparity among subgroups with different demographic attributes, which is called model unfairness, and put lots of effort into carefully designing elegant architectures to address unfairness, which poses heavy training burden, brings poor generalization, and reveals the trade-off between model performance and fairness. To tackle these issues, we propose FairAdaBN by making batch normalization adaptive to sensitive attribute. This simple but effective design can be adopted to several classification backbones that are originally unaware of fairness. Additionally, we derive a novel loss function that restrains statistical parity between subgroups on mini-batches, encouraging the model to converge with considerable fairness. In order to evaluate the trade-off between model performance and fairness, we propose a new metric, named Fairness-Accuracy Trade-off Efficiency (FATE), to compute normalized fairness improvement over accuracy drop. Experiments on two dermatological datasets show that our proposed method outperforms other methods on fairness criteria and FATE.Comment: Accepted by MICCAI 202

Unsupervised augmentation optimization for few-shot medical image segmentation

The augmentation parameters matter to few-shot semantic segmentation since they directly affect the training outcome by feeding the networks with varying perturbated samples. However, searching optimal augmentation parameters for few-shot segmentation models without annotations is a challenge that current methods fail to address. In this paper, we first propose a framework to determine the ``optimal'' parameters without human annotations by solving a distribution-matching problem between the intra-instance and intra-class similarity distribution, with the intra-instance similarity describing the similarity between the original sample of a particular anatomy and its augmented ones and the intra-class similarity representing the similarity between the selected sample and the others in the same class. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our optimized augmentation in boosting few-shot segmentation models. We greatly improve the top competing method by 1.27\% and 1.11\% on Abd-MRI and Abd-CT datasets, respectively, and even achieve a significant improvement for SSL-ALP on the left kidney by 3.39\% on the Abd-CT dataset

A data-driven approach with uncertainty quantification for predicting future capacities and remaining useful life of lithium-ion battery

Predicting future capacities and remaining useful life (RUL) with uncertainty quantification is a key but challenging issue in the applications of battery health diagnosis and management. This paper applies advanced machine-learning techniques to achieve effective future capacities and RUL prediction for lithium-ion batteries with reliable uncertainty management. To be specific, after using the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method, the original battery capacity data is decomposed into some intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residual. Then the long short term memory (LSTM) sub-model is applied to estimate the residual while the gaussian process regression (GPR) sub-model is utilized to fit the IMFs with the uncertainty level. Consequently, both the long-term dependence of capacity and uncertainty quantification caused by the capacity regenerations can be captured directly and simultaneously. Experimental aging data from different batteries are deployed to evaluate the performance of proposed LSTM+GPR model in comparison with the solo GPR, solo LSTM, GPR+EMD and LSTM+EMD models. Illustrative results demonstrate the combined LSTM+GPR model outperforms other counterparts and is capable of achieving accurate results for both 1-step and multi-step ahead capacity predictions. Even predicting the RUL at the early battery cycle stage, the proposed data-driven approach still presents good adaptability and reliable uncertainty quantification for battery health diagnosis

"In Dialogues We Learn": Towards Personalized Dialogue Without Pre-defined Profiles through In-Dialogue Learning

Personalized dialogue systems have gained significant attention in recent years for their ability to generate responses in alignment with different personas. However, most existing approaches rely on pre-defined personal profiles, which are not only time-consuming and labor-intensive to create but also lack flexibility. We propose In-Dialogue Learning (IDL), a fine-tuning framework that enhances the ability of pre-trained large language models to leverage dialogue history to characterize persona for completing personalized dialogue generation tasks without pre-defined profiles. Our experiments on three datasets demonstrate that IDL brings substantial improvements, with BLEU and ROUGE scores increasing by up to 200% and 247%, respectively. Additionally, the results of human evaluations further validate the efficacy of our proposed method

Vision Backbone Enhancement via Multi-Stage Cross-Scale Attention

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success in various vision tasks. However, many architectures do not consider interactions between feature maps from different stages and scales, which may limit their performance. In this work, we propose a simple add-on attention module to overcome these limitations via multi-stage and cross-scale interactions. Specifically, the proposed Multi-Stage Cross-Scale Attention (MSCSA) module takes feature maps from different stages to enable multi-stage interactions and achieves cross-scale interactions by computing self-attention at different scales based on the multi-stage feature maps. Our experiments on several downstream tasks show that MSCSA provides a significant performance boost with modest additional FLOPs and runtime

Effect of microwave irradiation on the viscosity of crude oil:A view at the molecular level

The increase in global energy demand and decrease in easily extractable light crude oil has generated a growing interest in heavy oil exploitation. However, the high viscosity of heavy oil leads to exploitation, transportation and refining challenges. In this context, microwave irradiation of crude oil samples from Sudan, China (Liaohe) and Venezuela were carried out to investigate the mechanisms of viscosity reduction. Saturate, aromatic, resin, and asphaltene (SARA) analysis of the crude oils was conducted according to the American Society Test and Materials standard, ASTM D4124-09. The SARA fractionation results demonstrated that microwave irradiation may affect the structure of resin/asphaltene micelles, thus leading to a change in the viscosity of the crude oil. The crude oils were further examined using the combined analytical techniques of electrospray ionization and Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (ESI FT-ICR MS). The results from ESI FT-ICR MS analysis demonstrated that microwave irradiation of crude oil with a high proportion of O2 compounds leads to polymerization, and ultimately an increase in the viscosity of the crude oil after microwave treatment. In other cases, cracking might occur due to the microwave heating

CharacterChat: Learning towards Conversational AI with Personalized Social Support

In our modern, fast-paced, and interconnected world, the importance of mental well-being has grown into a matter of great urgency. However, traditional methods such as Emotional Support Conversations (ESC) face challenges in effectively addressing a diverse range of individual personalities. In response, we introduce the Social Support Conversation (S2Conv) framework. It comprises a series of support agents and the interpersonal matching mechanism, linking individuals with persona-compatible virtual supporters. Utilizing persona decomposition based on the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), we have created the MBTI-1024 Bank, a group that of virtual characters with distinct profiles. Through improved role-playing prompts with behavior preset and dynamic memory, we facilitate the development of the MBTI-S2Conv dataset, which contains conversations between the characters in the MBTI-1024 Bank. Building upon these foundations, we present CharacterChat, a comprehensive S2Conv system, which includes a conversational model driven by personas and memories, along with an interpersonal matching plugin model that dispatches the optimal supporters from the MBTI-1024 Bank for individuals with specific personas. Empirical results indicate the remarkable efficacy of CharacterChat in providing personalized social support and highlight the substantial advantages derived from interpersonal matching. The source code is available in \url{https://github.com/morecry/CharacterChat}.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 5 table