1,410 research outputs found
Spectral and Temporal Interrogation of Cerebral Hemodynamics Via High Speed Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging
Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging (LSCI) is a non-scanning wide field-of-view optical imaging technique specifically developed for cerebral blood flow (CBF) monitoring. In this project, a versatile Laser speckle contrast imaging system has been designed and developed to monitor CBF changes and examine the physical properties of cerebral vasculature during functional brain activation experiments.
The hardware of the system consists of a high speed CMOS camera, a coherent light source, a trinocular microscope, and a PC that does camera controlling and data storage. The simplicity of the system’s hardware makes it suitable for biological experiments.
In controlled flow experiments using a custom made microfluidic channel, the linearity of the CBF estimates was evaluated under high speed imaging settings. Under the camera exposure time setting in the range of tens of micro-seconds, results show a linear relationship between the CBF estimates and the flow rates within the microchannel. This validation permitted LSCI to be used in high frame rate imaging and the method is only limited by the camera speed. In an in vivo experiment, the amount of oxygen intake via breathing by a rat was reduced to 12% to induce the dilation of the vessels. Results demonstrated a positive correlation between the system’s CBF estimates and the pulse wave velocity derived from aortic blood pressure.
To exemplify the instantaneous pulsatility flow study acquired at high sampling rate, a pulsatile cerebral blood flow analysis was conducted on two vessels, an arteriole and a venule. The pulsatile waveform results, captured under sampling rate close to 2000 Hz. The pulse of the arteriole rises 13ms faster than the pulse of the venule, and it takes 6ms longer for the pulse of the arteriole to fall below the lower fall-time boundary. By using the second order derivative (accelerated) CBF estimates, the vascular stiffness was evaluated. Results show the arteriole and the venule have increased-vascular-stiffness indices of 0.95 and 0.74. On the other side, the arteriole and the venule have decreased-vascular-stiffness indices of 0.125 and 0.35. Both vascular stiffness indices suggested that the wall of arteriole is more rigid than the venule.
The proposed LSCI system can monitor the mean flow over function activation experiment, and the interrogation of blood flow in terms of physiological oscillations. The proposed vascular stiffness metrics for estimating the stroke preliminary symptom, may eventually lead to insights of stroke and its causes
TempME: Towards the Explainability of Temporal Graph Neural Networks via Motif Discovery
Temporal graphs are widely used to model dynamic systems with time-varying
interactions. In real-world scenarios, the underlying mechanisms of generating
future interactions in dynamic systems are typically governed by a set of
recurring substructures within the graph, known as temporal motifs. Despite the
success and prevalence of current temporal graph neural networks (TGNN), it
remains uncertain which temporal motifs are recognized as the significant
indications that trigger a certain prediction from the model, which is a
critical challenge for advancing the explainability and trustworthiness of
current TGNNs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, called
Temporal Motifs Explainer (TempME), which uncovers the most pivotal temporal
motifs guiding the prediction of TGNNs. Derived from the information bottleneck
principle, TempME extracts the most interaction-related motifs while minimizing
the amount of contained information to preserve the sparsity and succinctness
of the explanation. Events in the explanations generated by TempME are verified
to be more spatiotemporally correlated than those of existing approaches,
providing more understandable insights. Extensive experiments validate the
superiority of TempME, with up to 8.21% increase in terms of explanation
accuracy across six real-world datasets and up to 22.96% increase in boosting
the prediction Average Precision of current TGNNs.Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2023, Camera Ready Versio
Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems
Recent advancements in deep neural networks for graph-structured data have
led to state-of-the-art performance on recommender system benchmarks. However,
making these methods practical and scalable to web-scale recommendation tasks
with billions of items and hundreds of millions of users remains a challenge.
Here we describe a large-scale deep recommendation engine that we developed and
deployed at Pinterest. We develop a data-efficient Graph Convolutional Network
(GCN) algorithm PinSage, which combines efficient random walks and graph
convolutions to generate embeddings of nodes (i.e., items) that incorporate
both graph structure as well as node feature information. Compared to prior GCN
approaches, we develop a novel method based on highly efficient random walks to
structure the convolutions and design a novel training strategy that relies on
harder-and-harder training examples to improve robustness and convergence of
the model. We also develop an efficient MapReduce model inference algorithm to
generate embeddings using a trained model. We deploy PinSage at Pinterest and
train it on 7.5 billion examples on a graph with 3 billion nodes representing
pins and boards, and 18 billion edges. According to offline metrics, user
studies and A/B tests, PinSage generates higher-quality recommendations than
comparable deep learning and graph-based alternatives. To our knowledge, this
is the largest application of deep graph embeddings to date and paves the way
for a new generation of web-scale recommender systems based on graph
convolutional architectures.Comment: KDD 201
The Real Deal: A Review of Challenges and Opportunities in Moving Reinforcement Learning-Based Traffic Signal Control Systems Towards Reality
Traffic signal control (TSC) is a high-stakes domain that is growing in
importance as traffic volume grows globally. An increasing number of works are
applying reinforcement learning (RL) to TSC; RL can draw on an abundance of
traffic data to improve signalling efficiency. However, RL-based signal
controllers have never been deployed. In this work, we provide the first review
of challenges that must be addressed before RL can be deployed for TSC. We
focus on four challenges involving (1) uncertainty in detection, (2)
reliability of communications, (3) compliance and interpretability, and (4)
heterogeneous road users. We show that the literature on RL-based TSC has made
some progress towards addressing each challenge. However, more work should take
a systems thinking approach that considers the impacts of other pipeline
components on RL.Comment: 26 pages; accepted version, with shortened version published at the
12th International Workshop on Agents in Traffic and Transportation (ATT '22)
at IJCAI 202
One-Dimensional Sensor Learns to Sense Three-Dimensional Space
A sensor system with ultra-high sensitivity, high resolution, rapid response time, and a high signal-to-noise ratio can produce raw data that is exceedingly rich in information, including signals that have the appearances of noise . The noise feature directly correlates to measurands in orthogonal dimensions, and are simply manifestations of the off-diagonal elements of 2nd-order tensors that describe the spatial anisotropy of matter in physical structures and spaces. The use of machine learning techniques to extract useful meanings from the rich information afforded by ultra-sensitive one-dimensional sensors may offer the potential for probing mundane events for novel embedded phenomena. Inspired by our very recent invention of ultra-sensitive optical-based inclinometers, this work aims to answer a transformative question for the first time: can a single-dimension point sensor with ultra-high sensitivity, fidelity, and signal-to-noise ratio identify an arbitrary mechanical impact event in three-dimensional space? This work is expected to inspire researchers in the fields of sensing and measurement to promote the development of a new generation of powerful sensors or sensor networks with expanded functionalities and enhanced intelligence, which may provide rich n-dimensional information, and subsequently, data-driven insights into significant problems
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Google: The World’s First Information Utility?
In only ten years, Google has achieved remarkable success from online search-based advertising. Its search engine is dominant, and its IT infrastructure is the most powerful computing system in the world running on over one million computers and serving more than one billion users globally. Google makes money by using its search engine to deliver online advertising alongside responses to user searches for information, goods, maps, directions, and a host of other services. Its capabilities make it likely to become the world’s first information utility – a concept similar to electric utilities that provide services to many corporations and individuals alike. Constant innovation is the key to Google’s success and offers lessons for other companies: hire talented people, have them work in small teams, and give them freedom to excel, but use a rigorous data-based approach to evaluating results and making course adjustments
D4Explainer: In-Distribution GNN Explanations via Discrete Denoising Diffusion
The widespread deployment of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) sparks significant
interest in their explainability, which plays a vital role in model auditing
and ensuring trustworthy graph learning. The objective of GNN explainability is
to discern the underlying graph structures that have the most significant
impact on model predictions. Ensuring that explanations generated are reliable
necessitates consideration of the in-distribution property, particularly due to
the vulnerability of GNNs to out-of-distribution data. Unfortunately,
prevailing explainability methods tend to constrain the generated explanations
to the structure of the original graph, thereby downplaying the significance of
the in-distribution property and resulting in explanations that lack
reliability. To address these challenges, we propose D4Explainer, a novel
approach that provides in-distribution GNN explanations for both counterfactual
and model-level explanation scenarios. The proposed D4Explainer incorporates
generative graph distribution learning into the optimization objective, which
accomplishes two goals: 1) generate a collection of diverse counterfactual
graphs that conform to the in-distribution property for a given instance, and
2) identify the most discriminative graph patterns that contribute to a
specific class prediction, thus serving as model-level explanations. It is
worth mentioning that D4Explainer is the first unified framework that combines
both counterfactual and model-level explanations. Empirical evaluations
conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets provide compelling evidence of
the state-of-the-art performance achieved by D4Explainer in terms of
explanation accuracy, faithfulness, diversity, and robustness.Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2023, Camera Ready Versio
Generative Explanations for Graph Neural Network: Methods and Evaluations
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in various
graph-related tasks. However, the black-box nature often limits their
interpretability and trustworthiness. Numerous explainability methods have been
proposed to uncover the decision-making logic of GNNs, by generating underlying
explanatory substructures. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive review of
the existing explanation methods for GNNs from the perspective of graph
generation. Specifically, we propose a unified optimization objective for
generative explanation methods, comprising two sub-objectives: Attribution and
Information constraints. We further demonstrate their specific manifestations
in various generative model architectures and different explanation scenarios.
With the unified objective of the explanation problem, we reveal the shared
characteristics and distinctions among current methods, laying the foundation
for future methodological advancements. Empirical results demonstrate the
advantages and limitations of different explainability approaches in terms of
explanation performance, efficiency, and generalizability
Purpose in the Machine: Do Traffic Simulators Produce Distributionally Equivalent Outcomes for Reinforcement Learning Applications?
Traffic simulators are used to generate data for learning in intelligent
transportation systems (ITSs). A key question is to what extent their modelling
assumptions affect the capabilities of ITSs to adapt to various scenarios when
deployed in the real world. This work focuses on two simulators commonly used
to train reinforcement learning (RL) agents for traffic applications, CityFlow
and SUMO. A controlled virtual experiment varying driver behavior and
simulation scale finds evidence against distributional equivalence in
RL-relevant measures from these simulators, with the root mean squared error
and KL divergence being significantly greater than 0 for all assessed measures.
While granular real-world validation generally remains infeasible, these
findings suggest that traffic simulators are not a deus ex machina for RL
training: understanding the impacts of inter-simulator differences is necessary
to train and deploy RL-based ITSs.Comment: 12 pages; accepted version, published at the 2023 Winter Simulation
Conference (WSC '23
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