An increasing number of public datasets have shown a marked clinical impact on assessing anatomical structures. However, each of the datasets is small, partially labeled, and rarely investigates severe tumor subjects. Moreover, current models are limited to segmenting specific organs/tumors, which can not be extended to novel domains and classes. To tackle these limitations, we introduce embedding learned from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to segmentation models, dubbed the CLIP-Driven Universal Model. The Universal Model can better segment 25 organs and 6 types of tumors by exploiting the semantic relationship between abdominal structures. The model is developed from an assembly of 14 datasets with 3,410 CT scans and evaluated on 6,162 external CT scans from 3 datasets. We rank first on the public leaderboard of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) and achieve the state-of-the-art results on Beyond The Cranial Vault (BTCV). Compared with dataset-specific models, the Universal Model is computationally more efficient (6x faster), generalizes better to CT scans from varying sites, and shows stronger transfer learning performance on novel tasks. The design of CLIP embedding enables the Universal Model to be easily extended to new classes without catastrophically forgetting the previously learned classes.

Explainability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is critical to various GNN applications but remains an open challenge. A convincing explanation should be both necessary and sufficient simultaneously. However, existing GNN explaining approaches focus on only one of the two aspects, necessity or sufficiency, or a trade-off between the two. To search for the most necessary and sufficient explanation, the Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS) can be applied since it can mathematically quantify the necessity and sufficiency of an explanation. Nevertheless, the difficulty of obtaining PNS due to non-monotonicity and the challenge of counterfactual estimation limits its wide use. To address the non-identifiability of PNS, we resort to a lower bound of PNS that can be optimized via counterfactual estimation, and propose Necessary and Sufficient Explanation for GNN (NSEG) via optimizing that lower bound. Specifically, we employ nearest neighbor matching to generate counterfactual samples for the features, which is different from the random perturbation. In particular, NSEG combines the edges and node features to generate an explanation, where the common edge explanation is a special case of the combined explanation. Empirical study shows that NSEG achieves excellent performance in generating the most necessary and sufficient explanations among a series of state-of-the-art methods.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) recently emerged as a promising tool for analyzing and solving complex differential equations arising in science and engineering applications. Alternative to traditional numerical schemes, learning-based solvers utilize the representation power of DNNs to approximate the input-output relations in an automated manner. However, the lack of physics-in-the-loop often makes it difficult to construct a neural network solver that simultaneously achieves high accuracy, low computational burden, and interpretability. In this work, focusing on a class of evolutionary PDEs characterized by having decomposable operators, we show that the classical ``operator splitting'' numerical scheme of solving these equations can be exploited to design neural network architectures. This gives rise to a learning-based PDE solver, which we name Deep Operator-Splitting Network (DOSnet). Such non-black-box network design is constructed from the physical rules and operators governing the underlying dynamics contains learnable parameters, and is thus more flexible than the standard operator splitting scheme. Once trained, it enables the fast solution of the same type of PDEs. To validate the special structure inside DOSnet, we take the linear PDEs as the benchmark and give the mathematical explanation for the weight behavior. Furthermore, to demonstrate the advantages of our new AI-enhanced PDE solver, we train and validate it on several types of operator-decomposable differential equations. We also apply DOSnet to nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations (NLSE) which have important applications in the signal processing for modern optical fiber transmission systems, and experimental results show that our model has better accuracy and lower computational complexity than numerical schemes and the baseline DNNs.

This article proposes a model-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method to design emergency control strategies for short-term voltage stability problems in power systems. Recent advances show promising results in model-free DRL-based methods for power systems, but model-free methods suffer from poor sample efficiency and training time, both critical for making state-of-the-art DRL algorithms practically applicable. DRL-agent learns an optimal policy via a trial-and-error method while interacting with the real-world environment. And it is desirable to minimize the direct interaction of the DRL agent with the real-world power grid due to its safety-critical nature. Additionally, state-of-the-art DRL-based policies are mostly trained using a physics-based grid simulator where dynamic simulation is computationally intensive, lowering the training efficiency. We propose a novel model-based-DRL framework where a deep neural network (DNN)-based dynamic surrogate model, instead of a real-world power-grid or physics-based simulation, is utilized with the policy learning framework, making the process faster and sample efficient. However, stabilizing model-based DRL is challenging because of the complex system dynamics of large-scale power systems. We solved these issues by incorporating imitation learning to have a warm start in policy learning, reward-shaping, and multi-step surrogate loss. Finally, we achieved 97.5% sample efficiency and 87.7% training efficiency for an application to the IEEE 300-bus test system.

The deep learning community has witnessed an exponentially growing interest in self-supervised learning (SSL). However, it still remains unexplored how to build a framework for learning useful representations of raw music waveforms in a self-supervised manner. In this work, we design Music2Vec, a framework exploring different SSL algorithmic components and tricks for music audio recordings. Our model achieves comparable results to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) music SSL model Jukebox, despite being significantly smaller with less than 2% of parameters of the latter. The model will be released on Huggingface(Please refer to: https://huggingface.co/m-a-p/music2vec-v1)

Communication is supposed to improve multi-agent collaboration and overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, such improvements are prevalently limited in practice since most existing communication schemes ignore communication overheads (e.g., communication delays). In this paper, we demonstrate that ignoring communication delays has detrimental effects on collaborations, especially in delay-sensitive tasks such as autonomous driving. To mitigate this impact, we design a delay-aware multi-agent communication model (DACOM) to adapt communication to delays. Specifically, DACOM introduces a component, TimeNet, that is responsible for adjusting the waiting time of an agent to receive messages from other agents such that the uncertainty associated with delay can be addressed. Our experiments reveal that DACOM has a non-negligible performance improvement over other mechanisms by making a better trade-off between the benefits of communication and the costs of waiting for messages.

Hashing has been widely researched to solve the large-scale approximate nearest neighbor search problem owing to its time and storage superiority. In recent years, a number of online hashing methods have emerged, which can update the hash functions to adapt to the new stream data and realize dynamic retrieval. However, existing online hashing methods are required to update the whole database with the latest hash functions when a query arrives, which leads to low retrieval efficiency with the continuous increase of the stream data. On the other hand, these methods ignore the supervision relationship among the examples, especially in the multi-label case. In this paper, we propose a novel Fast Online Hashing (FOH) method which only updates the binary codes of a small part of the database. To be specific, we first build a query pool in which the nearest neighbors of each central point are recorded. When a new query arrives, only the binary codes of the corresponding potential neighbors are updated. In addition, we create a similarity matrix which takes the multi-label supervision information into account and bring in the multi-label projection loss to further preserve the similarity among the multi-label data. The experimental results on two common benchmarks show that the proposed FOH can achieve dramatic superiority on query time up to 6.28 seconds less than state-of-the-art baselines with competitive retrieval accuracy.

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation is typically inspired by class activation maps, which serve as pseudo masks with class-discriminative regions highlighted. Although tremendous efforts have been made to recall precise and complete locations for each class, existing methods still commonly suffer from the unsolicited Out-of-Candidate (OC) error predictions that not belongs to the label candidates, which could be avoidable since the contradiction with image-level class tags is easy to be detected. In this paper, we develop a group ranking-based Out-of-Candidate Rectification (OCR) mechanism in a plug-and-play fashion. Firstly, we adaptively split the semantic categories into In-Candidate (IC) and OC groups for each OC pixel according to their prior annotation correlation and posterior prediction correlation. Then, we derive a differentiable rectification loss to force OC pixels to shift to the IC group. Incorporating our OCR with seminal baselines (e.g., AffinityNet, SEAM, MCTformer), we can achieve remarkable performance gains on both Pascal VOC (+3.2%, +3.3%, +0.8% mIoU) and MS COCO (+1.0%, +1.3%, +0.5% mIoU) datasets with negligible extra training overhead, which justifies the effectiveness and generality of our OCR.

虽然视觉变压器（VT）体系结构在计算机视觉中越来越流行，但纯VT模型在微小的数据集上的性能较差。为了解决这个问题，本文提出了改善小型数据集VT性能的地方指南。我们首先分析，由于VTS中自我注意的机制的高灵活性和内在的全球性，因此很难用有限的数据来学习局部信息，这对于理解图像非常重要。为了促进本地信息，我们通过模仿已经训练有素的卷积神经网络（CNN）的特征来实现VT的当地指南，灵感来自CNN的内置本地到全球层次结构。在我们的双任务学习范式下，由低分辨率图像训练的轻型CNN提供的局部指导足以加速收敛并在很大程度上提高VT的性能。因此，我们的本地指导方法非常简单有效，可以作为小型数据集中VT的基本性能增强方法。广泛的实验表明，我们的方法在小型数据集中从头开始训练时可以显着改善VT，并且与不同种类的VT和数据集兼容。例如，我们提出的方法可以将各种VT在微型数据集上的性能提高（例如，DEIT 13.07％，T2T为8.98％，PVT为7.85％），并使更强大的基线PVTV2提高了1.86％至79.30％，显示出来小型数据集上的VT潜力。该代码可从https://github.com/lkhl/tiny-transformers获得。

人工智能的最新趋势是将验证的模型用于语言和视觉任务，这些模型已经实现了非凡的表现，但也令人困惑。因此，以各种方式探索这些模型的能力对该领域至关重要。在本文中，我们探讨了模型的可靠性，在其中我们将可靠的模型定义为一个不仅可以实现强大的预测性能，而且在许多涉及不确定性（例如选择性预测，开放式设置识别）的决策任务上，在许多决策任务上表现出色，而且表现良好。强大的概括（例如，准确性和适当的评分规则，例如在分布数据集中和分发数据集上的对数可能性）和适应性（例如，主动学习，几乎没有射击不确定性）。我们设计了40个数据集的10种任务类型，以评估视觉和语言域上可靠性的不同方面。为了提高可靠性，我们分别开发了VIT-PLEX和T5-PLEX，分别针对视觉和语言方式扩展了大型模型。 PLEX极大地改善了跨可靠性任务的最先进，并简化了传统协议，因为它可以改善开箱即用的性能，并且不需要设计分数或为每个任务调整模型。我们演示了高达1B参数的模型尺寸的缩放效果，并预处理数据集大小最多4B示例。我们还展示了PLEX在具有挑战性的任务上的功能，包括零射门的开放式识别，主动学习和对话语言理解中的不确定性。