Channel Attention Separable Convolution Network for Skin Lesion Segmentation

Skin cancer is a frequently occurring cancer in the human population, and it is very important to be able to diagnose malignant tumors in the body early. Lesion segmentation is crucial for monitoring the morphological changes of skin lesions, extracting features to localize and identify diseases to assist doctors in early diagnosis. Manual de-segmentation of dermoscopic images is error-prone and time-consuming, thus there is a pressing demand for precise and automated segmentation algorithms. Inspired by advanced mechanisms such as U-Net, DenseNet, Separable Convolution, Channel Attention, and Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP), we propose a novel network called Channel Attention Separable Convolution Network (CASCN) for skin lesions segmentation. The proposed CASCN is evaluated on the PH2 dataset with limited images. Without excessive pre-/post-processing of images, CASCN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PH2 dataset with Dice similarity coefficient of 0.9461 and accuracy of 0.9645.Comment: Accepted by ICONIP 202

Handling realistic noise in multi-agent systems with self-supervised learning and curiosity

Most reinforcement learning benchmarks – especially in multi-agent tasks – do not go beyond observations with simple noise; nonetheless, real scenarios induce more elaborate vision pipeline failures: false sightings, misclassifications or occlusion. In this work, we propose a lightweight, 2D environment for robot soccer and autonomous driving that can emulate the above discrepancies. Besides establishing a benchmark for accessible multiagent reinforcement learning research, our work addresses the challenges the simulator imposes. For handling realistic noise, we use self-supervised learning to enhance scene reconstruction and extend curiosity-driven learning to model longer horizons. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance, compared against actor-critic methods, ICM, and PPO

Dimension Reduction for Objects Composed of Vector Sets

Dimension reduction and feature selection are fundamental tools for machine learning and data mining. Most existing methods, however, assume that objects are represented by a single vectorial descriptor. In reality, some description methods assign unordered sets or graphs of vectors to a single object, where each vector is assumed to have the same number of dimensions, but is drawn from a different probability distribution. Moreover, some applications (such as pose estimation) may require the recognition of individual vectors (nodes) of an object. In such cases it is essential that the nodes within a single object remain distinguishable after dimension reduction. In this paper we propose new discriminant analysis methods that are able to satisfy two criteria at the same time: separating between classes and between the nodes of an object instance. We analyze and evaluate our methods on several different synthetic and real-world datasets