Achieving non-discrimination in prediction

Discrimination-aware classification is receiving an increasing attention in data science fields. The pre-process methods for constructing a discrimination-free classifier first remove discrimination from the training data, and then learn the classifier from the cleaned data. However, they lack a theoretical guarantee for the potential discrimination when the classifier is deployed for prediction. In this paper, we fill this gap by mathematically bounding the probability of the discrimination in prediction being within a given interval in terms of the training data and classifier. We adopt the causal model for modeling the data generation mechanism, and formally defining discrimination in population, in a dataset, and in prediction. We obtain two important theoretical results: (1) the discrimination in prediction can still exist even if the discrimination in the training data is completely removed; and (2) not all pre-process methods can ensure non-discrimination in prediction even though they can achieve non-discrimination in the modified training data. Based on the results, we develop a two-phase framework for constructing a discrimination-free classifier with a theoretical guarantee. The experiments demonstrate the theoretical results and show the effectiveness of our two-phase framework

Umbilical cord derived mesenchymal stem cell therapy for osteoarthritis: a consolidated review

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a leading cause of degenerative disease and is the most common persistent condition worldwide. The common burden imposed by OA significantly damages the articular cartilage, which results in pain and seriously impacts the quality of life in the affected people. Disease progression is assumed to increase with obesity and aging. The current therapies include weight loss, activity adjustment, traditional pain management and replacement of the affected joint. To overcome these limitations, recently, cell-based therapies mainly Umbilical cord derived Mesenchymal stem cell (UC-MSC) have become an attractive cell source for an allogeneic mesenchymal stem cell to repair and regenerate the structure and function of articular tissues. Although the mechanism is not clearly defined, it is believed that the paracrine signaling, inflammatory response, and immunomodulatory role of UC-MSCs play a crucial role in developing a treatment approach of OA. The purpose of this review was to outline the advantages of using UC-MSCs in treating OA. This review also discusses the possible hurdles that stand in the way of successful implementation of UC-MSC as a routine treatment regimen for OA

Private Estimation and Inference in High-Dimensional Regression with FDR Control

This paper presents novel methodologies for conducting practical differentially private (DP) estimation and inference in high-dimensional linear regression. We start by proposing a differentially private Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) for selecting the unknown sparsity parameter in DP-Lasso, eliminating the need for prior knowledge of model sparsity, a requisite in the existing literature. Then we propose a differentially private debiased LASSO algorithm that enables privacy-preserving inference on regression parameters. Our proposed method enables accurate and private inference on the regression parameters by leveraging the inherent sparsity of high-dimensional linear regression models. Additionally, we address the issue of multiple testing in high-dimensional linear regression by introducing a differentially private multiple testing procedure that controls the false discovery rate (FDR). This allows for accurate and privacy-preserving identification of significant predictors in the regression model. Through extensive simulations and real data analysis, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methods in conducting inference for high-dimensional linear models while safeguarding privacy and controlling the FDR

DragonDiffusion: Enabling Drag-style Manipulation on Diffusion Models

Despite the ability of existing large-scale text-to-image (T2I) models to generate high-quality images from detailed textual descriptions, they often lack the ability to precisely edit the generated or real images. In this paper, we propose a novel image editing method, DragonDiffusion, enabling Drag-style manipulation on Diffusion models. Specifically, we construct classifier guidance based on the strong correspondence of intermediate features in the diffusion model. It can transform the editing signals into gradients via feature correspondence loss to modify the intermediate representation of the diffusion model. Based on this guidance strategy, we also build a multi-scale guidance to consider both semantic and geometric alignment. Moreover, a cross-branch self-attention is added to maintain the consistency between the original image and the editing result. Our method, through an efficient design, achieves various editing modes for the generated or real images, such as object moving, object resizing, object appearance replacement, and content dragging. It is worth noting that all editing and content preservation signals come from the image itself, and the model does not require fine-tuning or additional modules. Our source code will be available at https://github.com/MC-E/DragonDiffusion

VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution

Most of the existing video face super-resolution (VFSR) methods are trained and evaluated on VoxCeleb1, which is designed specifically for speaker identification and the frames in this dataset are of low quality. As a consequence, the VFSR models trained on this dataset can not output visual-pleasing results. In this paper, we develop an automatic and scalable pipeline to collect a high-quality video face dataset (VFHQ), which contains over $16,000$ high-fidelity clips of diverse interview scenarios. To verify the necessity of VFHQ, we further conduct experiments and demonstrate that VFSR models trained on our VFHQ dataset can generate results with sharper edges and finer textures than those trained on VoxCeleb1. In addition, we show that the temporal information plays a pivotal role in eliminating video consistency issues as well as further improving visual performance. Based on VFHQ, by analyzing the benchmarking study of several state-of-the-art algorithms under bicubic and blind settings. See our project page: https://liangbinxie.github.io/projects/vfhqComment: Project webpage available at https://liangbinxie.github.io/projects/vfh