Scalarization for Multi-Task and Multi-Domain Learning at Scale

Training a single model on multiple input domains and/or output tasks allows for compressing information from multiple sources into a unified backbone hence improves model efficiency. It also enables potential positive knowledge transfer across tasks/domains, leading to improved accuracy and data-efficient training. However, optimizing such networks is a challenge, in particular due to discrepancies between the different tasks or domains: Despite several hypotheses and solutions proposed over the years, recent work has shown that uniform scalarization training, i.e., simply minimizing the average of the task losses, yields on-par performance with more costly SotA optimization methods. This raises the issue of how well we understand the training dynamics of multi-task and multi-domain networks. In this work, we first devise a large-scale unified analysis of multi-domain and multi-task learning to better understand the dynamics of scalarization across varied task/domain combinations and model sizes. Following these insights, we then propose to leverage population-based training to efficiently search for the optimal scalarization weights when dealing with a large number of tasks or domains.Comment: NeurIPS 2023; https://openreview.net/forum?id=TSuq3debn

Novel chromatin texture features for the classification of Pap smears

This paper presents a set of novel structural texture features for quantifying nuclear chromatin patterns in cells on a conventional Pap smear. The features are derived from an initial segmentation of the chromatin into bloblike texture primitives. The results of a comprehensive feature selection experiment, including the set of proposed structural texture features and a range of different cytology features drawn from the literature, show that two of the four top ranking features are structural texture features. They also show that a combination of structural and conventional features yields a classification performance of 0.954±0.019 (AUC±SE) for the discrimination of normal (NILM) and abnormal (LSIL and HSIL) slides. The results of a second classification experiment, using only normal-appearing cells from both normal and abnormal slides, demonstrates that a single structural texture feature measuring chromatin margination yields a classification performance of 0.815±0.019. Overall the results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed structural approach and that it is possible to detect malignancy associated changes (MACs) in Papanicoloau stain

Conditional Channel Gated Networks for Task-Aware Continual Learning

Convolutional Neural Networks experience catastrophic forgetting when optimized on a sequence of learning problems: as they meet the objective of the current training examples, their performance on previous tasks drops drastically. In this work, we introduce a novel framework to tackle this problem with conditional computation. We equip each convolutional layer with task-specific gating modules, selecting which filters to apply on the given input. This way, we achieve two appealing properties. Firstly, the execution patterns of the gates allow to identify and protect important filters, ensuring no loss in the performance of the model for previously learned tasks. Secondly, by using a sparsity objective, we can promote the selection of a limited set of kernels, allowing to retain sufficient model capacity to digest new tasks.Existing solutions require, at test time, awareness of the task to which each example belongs to. This knowledge, however, may not be available in many practical scenarios. Therefore, we additionally introduce a task classifier that predicts the task label of each example, to deal with settings in which a task oracle is not available. We validate our proposal on four continual learning datasets. Results show that our model consistently outperforms existing methods both in the presence and the absence of a task oracle. Notably, on Split SVHN and Imagenet-50 datasets, our model yields up to 23.98% and 17.42% improvement in accuracy w.r.t. competing methods.Comment: CVPR 2020 (oral

Context-aware stacked convolutional neural networks for classification of breast carcinomas in whole-slide histopathology images

Automated classification of histopathological whole-slide images (WSI) of breast tissue requires analysis at very high resolutions with a large contextual area. In this paper, we present context-aware stacked convolutional neural networks (CNN) for classification of breast WSIs into normal/benign, ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), and invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC). We first train a CNN using high pixel resolution patches to capture cellular level information. The feature responses generated by this model are then fed as input to a second CNN, stacked on top of the first. Training of this stacked architecture with large input patches enables learning of fine-grained (cellular) details and global interdependence of tissue structures. Our system is trained and evaluated on a dataset containing 221 WSIs of H&E stained breast tissue specimens. The system achieves an AUC of 0.962 for the binary classification of non-malignant and malignant slides and obtains a three class accuracy of 81.3% for classification of WSIs into normal/benign, DCIS, and IDC, demonstrating its potentials for routine diagnostics

A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis

Deep learning algorithms, in particular convolutional networks, have rapidly become a methodology of choice for analyzing medical images. This paper reviews the major deep learning concepts pertinent to medical image analysis and summarizes over 300 contributions to the field, most of which appeared in the last year. We survey the use of deep learning for image classification, object detection, segmentation, registration, and other tasks and provide concise overviews of studies per application area. Open challenges and directions for future research are discussed.Comment: Revised survey includes expanded discussion section and reworked introductory section on common deep architectures. Added missed papers from before Feb 1st 201

Deep Interactive Learning: An Efficient Labeling Approach for Deep Learning-Based Osteosarcoma Treatment Response Assessment

Osteosarcoma is the most common malignant primary bone tumor. Standard treatment includes pre-operative chemotherapy followed by surgical resection. The response to treatment as measured by ratio of necrotic tumor area to overall tumor area is a known prognostic factor for overall survival. This assessment is currently done manually by pathologists by looking at glass slides under the microscope which may not be reproducible due to its subjective nature. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be used for automated segmentation of viable and necrotic tumor on osteosarcoma whole slide images. One bottleneck for supervised learning is that large amounts of accurate annotations are required for training which is a time-consuming and expensive process. In this paper, we describe Deep Interactive Learning (DIaL) as an efficient labeling approach for training CNNs. After an initial labeling step is done, annotators only need to correct mislabeled regions from previous segmentation predictions to improve the CNN model until the satisfactory predictions are achieved. Our experiments show that our CNN model trained by only 7 hours of annotation using DIaL can successfully estimate ratios of necrosis within expected inter-observer variation rate for non-standardized manual surgical pathology task.Comment: Accepted at MICCAI 202