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Targeted mass spectrometry (MS) holds promise for precise protein and protein‐representative peptide identification and quantification, enhancing disease diagnosis. However, its clinical application is hindered by complex data analysis and expert review requirements. It is hypothesized that machine learning (ML) models can automate data analysis to accelerate the clinical application of MS. The approach involves an ML‐driven pipeline that extracts statistical and morphological features from an MS target region and feeds these features into ML algorithms to generate and assess predictive models. The findings demonstrate ML prediction models exhibit superior performance when trained on extracted features versus raw spectra intensity data and that random forest models exhibit robust classification performance in both internal and external validation datasets. These models remain effective across varying training dataset sizes and positive sample rates and are enhanced by a nested active learning approach. This approach can thus revolutionize clinical MS applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Deep learning, which is a part of a broader concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and/or machine learning has achieved remarkable success in vision tasks. While there is growing interest in the use of this technology in diagnostic support for skin-related neglected tropical diseases (skin NTDs), there have been limited studies in this area and fewer focused on dark skin. In this study, we aimed to develop deep learning based AI models with clinical images we collected for five skin NTDs, namely, Buruli ulcer, leprosy, mycetoma, scabies, and yaws, to understand how diagnostic accuracy can or cannot be improved using different models and training patterns. Methodology: This study used photographs collected prospectively in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana through our ongoing studies with use of digital health tools for clinical data documentation and for teledermatology. Our dataset included a total of 1,709 images from 506 patients. Two convolutional neural networks, ResNet-50 and VGG-16 models were adopted to examine the performance of different deep learning architectures and validate their feasibility in diagnosis of the targeted skin NTDs. Principal findings: The two models were able to correctly predict over 70% of the diagnoses, and there was a consistent performance improvement with more training samples. The ResNet-50 model performed better than the VGG-16 model. Model trained with PCR confirmed cases of Buruli ulcer yielded 1–3% increase in prediction accuracy across all diseases besides for mycetoma, over a model which training sets included unconfirmed cases. Conclusions: Our approach was to have the deep learning model distinguish between multiple pathologies simultaneously–which is close to real-world practice. The more images used for training, the more accurate the diagnosis became. The percentages of correct diagnosis increased with PCR-positive cases of Buruli ulcer. This demonstrated that it may be better to input images from the more accurately diagnosed cases in the training models also for achieving better accuracy in the generated AI models. However, the increase was marginal which may be an indication that the accuracy of clinical diagnosis alone is reliable to an extent for Buruli ulcer. Diagnostic tests also have their flaws, and they are not always reliable. One hope for AI is that it will objectively resolve this gap between diagnostic tests and clinical diagnoses with the addition of another tool. While there are still challenges to be overcome, there is a potential for AI to address the unmet needs where access to medical care is limited, like for those affected by skin NTDs. Author summary: The diagnosis of skin diseases depends in large part, though not exclusively on visual inspection. The diagnosis and management of these diseases is thus particularly amenable to teledermatology approaches. The widespread availability of cell phone technology and electronic information transfer provides new potential for access to health care in low-income countries, yet there are limited efforts targeting these neglected populations with dark skin and consequently limited availability of tools. In this study, we leveraged a collection of skin images gathered through a system of teledermatology in the West African countries of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, and applied deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence (AI)—to see if deep learning models can distinguish between different diseases and support their diagnosis. Skin-related neglected tropical diseases, or skin NTDs, prevail in these regions and were our target conditions: Buruli ulcer, leprosy, mycetoma, scabies, and yaws. The accuracy of prediction depended on the number of images that were fed into the model for training with marginal improvement using laboratory confirmed cases in training. Using more images and greater efforts in this area, it is possible that AI can help address the unmet needs where access to medical care is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional machine learning algorithms suffer the problem that the model trained on existing data fails to generalize well to the data sampled from other distributions. To tackle this issue, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) transfers the knowledge learned from a well-labeled source domain to a different but related target domain where labeled data is unavailable. The majority of existing UDA methods assume that data from the source domain and the target domain are available and complete during training. Thus, the divergence between the two domains can be formulated and minimized. In this paper, we consider a more practical yet challenging UDA setting where either the source domain data or the target domain data are unknown. Conventional UDA methods would fail this setting since the domain divergence is agnostic due to the absence of the source data or the target data. Technically, we investigate UDA from a novel view—adversarial attack—and tackle the divergence-agnostic adaptive learning problem in a unified framework. Specifically, we first report the motivation of our approach by investigating the inherent relationship between UDA and adversarial attacks. Then we elaborately design adversarial examples to attack the training model and harness these adversarial examples. We argue that the generalization ability of the model would be significantly improved if it can defend against our attack, so as to improve the performance on the target domain. Theoretically, we analyze the generalization bound for our method based on domain adaptation theories. Extensive experimental results on multiple UDA benchmarks under conventional, source-absent and target-absent UDA settings verify that our method is able to achieve a favorable performance compared with previous ones. Notably, this work extends the scope of both domain adaptation and adversarial attack, and expected to inspire more ideas in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectral clustering (SC) has become one of the most widely-adopted clustering algorithms, and been successfully applied into various applications. We in this work explore the problem of spectral clustering in a lifelong learning framework termed as Generalized Lifelong Spectral Clustering (GL $^2$ 2 SC). Different from most current studies, which concentrate on a fixed spectral clustering task set and cannot efficiently incorporate a new clustering task, the goal of our work is to establish a generalized model for new spectral clustering tasks by “What” and “How” to lifelong learn from past tasks. In respect of “what to lifelong learn”, our GL $^2$ 2 SC framework contains a dual memory mechanism with a deep orthogonal factorization manner: an orthogonal basis memory stores hidden and hierarchical clustering centers among learned tasks, and a feature embedding memory captures deep manifold representation common across multiple related tasks. When learning a new clustering task, the intuition here for “how to lifelong learn” is that GL $^2$ 2 SC can transfer intrinsic knowledge from dual memory mechanism to obtain task-specific encoding matrix. Then the encoding matrix can redefine the dual memory over time to provide maximal benefits when learning future tasks, and reversely maximize performance for past tasks. To achieve this, we propose an alternative optimization formulation with convergence guarantee for solving our GL $^2$ 2 SC model. To the end, empirical comparisons on several benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our GL $^2$ 2 SC, in comparison with several state-of-the-art clustering models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human action recognition which recognizes human actions in a video is a fundamental task in computer vision field. Although multiple existing methods with single-view or multi-view have been presented for human action recognition, these recognition approaches cannot be extended into new action recognition or action classification tasks, as well as discover underlying correlations among different views. To tackle the above problem, this paper proposes a new lifelong multi-view subspace learning framework for continuous human action recognition, which could exploit the complementary information amongst different views from a lifelong learning perspective. More specifically, a set of view-specific libraries is established to gradually store the useful information within multiple views. As a new action recognition task comes, we decompose the model parameters into a set of embedded parameters over view-specific libraries. A latent representation subspace is constructed via encouraging it to be close to different view-specific libraries, which can leverage the high-order correlations among different views and further avoid partial information for action recognition task. Meanwhile, we propose to employ an alternating direction strategy to optimize our proposed method. Empirical studies on real-world multi-view action recognition datasets have shown that our proposed framework attains the superior recognition performance and saves the computational time when continually learning new action recognition tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domain adaptation aims to exploit domain-invariant features by aligning the cross-domain distributions in the manifold subspace for applying the classifier trained on the source domain to the target domain. However, two limitations may still deteriorate their performances: (1) the influences of noisy or irrelevant features in the original feature space are ignored, which may unexpectedly hurt the classification of target samples; (2) the graph constructed directly in the original data space cannot accurately capture the inherent local manifold structures of high-dimensional data due to the curse of dimensionality, which may seriously mislead the transferable features learning. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address these problems, referred to as joint Adaptive Dual Graph and Feature Selection for domain adaptation (ADGFS). Specifically, feature selection can characterize the relative importance of different features through a scaling factor, which enables ADGFS to not only reduce the impacts of noisy or irrelevant features on knowledge transfer but also learn informative domain-invariant features. Meanwhile, ADGFS adaptively optimizes the dual graph by learning the similarity matrices of both instance-level and feature-level graphs in the projected low-dimensional manifold subspace rather than the original high-dimensional space, such that the intrinsic local manifold structures of data can be captured precisely. Moreover, ADGFS simultaneously aligns the marginal and conditional probability distributions in the nonnegative matrix factorization framework to narrow the distribution discrepancies between the two different domains, which can adequately transfer knowledge from the source domain to the target domain. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets can demonstrate that the effectiveness of the proposed approach in cross-domain image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsupervised domain adaptation addresses the problem of transferring knowledge from a well-labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain where the two domains have distinctive data distributions. Thus, the essence of domain adaptation is to mitigate the distribution divergence between the two domains. The state-of-the-art methods practice this very idea by either conducting adversarial training or minimizing a metric which defines the distribution gaps. In this paper, we propose a new domain adaptation method named adversarial tight match (ATM) which enjoys the benefits of both adversarial training and metric learning. Specifically, at first, we propose a novel distance loss, named maximum density divergence (MDD), to quantify the distribution divergence. MDD minimizes the inter-domain divergence (“match” in ATM) and maximizes the intra-class density (“tight” in ATM). Then, to address the equilibrium challenge issue in adversarial domain adaptation, we consider leveraging the proposed MDD into adversarial domain adaptation framework. At last, we tailor the proposed MDD as a practical learning loss and report our ATM. Both empirical evaluation and theoretical analysis are reported to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results on four benchmarks, both classical and large-scale, show that our method is able to achieve new state-of-the-art performance on most evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, with the rapid development of data collection sources and feature extraction methods, multi-view data are getting easy to obtain and have received increasing research attention in recent years, among which, multi-view clustering (MVC) forms a mainstream research direction and is widely used in data analysis. However, existing MVC methods mainly assume that each sample appears in all the views, without considering the incomplete view case due to data corruption, sensor failure, equipment malfunction, etc. In this study, we design and build a generative partial multi-view clustering model with adaptive fusion and cycle consistency, named as GP-MVC, to solve the incomplete multi-view problem by explicitly generating the data of missing views. The main idea of GP-MVC lies in two-fold. First, multi-view encoder networks are trained to learn common low-dimensional representations, followed by a clustering layer to capture the shared cluster structure across multiple views. Second, view-specific generative adversarial networks with multi-view cycle consistency are developed to generate the missing data of one view conditioning on the shared representation given by other views. These two steps could be promoted mutually, where the learned common representation facilitates data imputation and the generated data could further explores the view consistency. Moreover, an weighted adaptive fusion scheme is implemented to exploit the complementary information among different views. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed GP-MVC over the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zero-shot learning has received great interest in visual recognition community. It aims to classify new unobserved classes based on the model learned from observed classes. Most zero-shot learning methods require pre-provided semantic attributes as the mid-level information to discover the intrinsic relationship between observed and unobserved categories. However, it is impractical to annotate the enriched label information of the observed objects in real-world applications, which would extremely hurt the performance of zero-shot learning with limited labeled seen data. To overcome this obstacle, we develop a Low-rank Semantics Grouping (LSG) method for zero-shot learning in a semi-supervised fashion, which attempts to jointly uncover the intrinsic relationship across visual and semantic information and recover the missing label information from seen classes. Specifically, the visual-semantic encoder is utilized as projection model, low-rank semantic grouping scheme is explored to capture the intrinsic attributes correlations and a Laplacian graph is constructed from the visual features to guide the label propagation from labeled instances to unlabeled ones. Experiments have been conducted on several standard zero-shot learning benchmarks, which demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method by comparing with state-of-the-art methods. Our model is robust to different levels of missing label settings. Also visualized results prove that the LSG can distinguish the test unseen classes more discriminative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weakly-supervised learning has attracted growing research attention on medical lesions segmentation due to significant saving in pixel-level annotation cost. However, 1) most existing methods require effective prior and constraints to explore the intrinsic lesions characterization, which only generates incorrect and rough prediction; 2) they neglect the underlying semantic dependencies among weakly-labeled target enteroscopy diseases and fully-annotated source gastroscope lesions, while forcefully utilizing untransferable dependencies leads to the negative performance. To tackle above issues, we propose a new weakly-supervised lesions transfer framework, which can not only explore transferable domain-invariant knowledge across different datasets, but also prevent the negative transfer of untransferable representations. Specifically, a Wasserstein quantified transferability framework is developed to highlight wide-range transferable contextual dependencies, while neglecting the irrelevant semantic characterizations. Moreover, a novel self-supervised pseudo label generator is designed to equally provide confident pseudo pixel labels for both hard-to-transfer and easy-to-transfer target samples. It inhibits the enormous deviation of false pseudo pixel labels under the self-supervision manner. Afterwards, dynamically-searched feature centroids are aligned to narrow category-wise distribution shift. Comprehensive theoretical analysis and experiments show the superiority of our model on the endoscopic dataset and several public datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A real-world recommender usually adopts heterogeneous types of user feedbacks, for example, numerical ratings such as 5-star grades and binary ratings such as likes and dislikes. In this work, we focus on transferring knowledge from binary ratings to numerical ratings, facing a more serious data sparsity problem. Conventional Collective Factorization methods usually assume that there are shared user and item latent factors across multiple related domains, but may ignore the shared common knowledge of rating patterns. Furthermore, existing works may also fail to consider the hierarchical structures in the heterogeneous recommendation scenario (i.e., genre, sub-genre, detailed-category). To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel Deep Low-rank Sparse Collective Factorization (DLSCF) framework for heterogeneous recommendation. Specifically, we adopt low-rank sparse decomposition to capture the common rating patterns in related domains while splitting the domain-specific patterns. We also factorize the model in multiple layers to capture the affiliation relation between latent categories and sub-categories. We propose both batch and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based optimization algorithms for solving DLSCF. Experimental results on MoviePilot, Netfilx, Flixter, MovieLens10M and MovieLens20M datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, by comparing them with several state-of-the-art batch and SGD based approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zero-shot learning for visual recognition, which approaches identifying unseen categories through a shared visual-semantic function learned on the seen categories and is expected to well adapt to unseen categories, has received considerable research attention most recently. However, the semantic gap between discriminant visual features and their underlying semantics is still the biggest obstacle, because there usually exists domain disparity across the seen and unseen classes. To deal with this challenge, we design two-stage generative adversarial networks to enhance the generalizability of semantic dictionary through low-rank embedding for zero-shot learning. In detail, we formulate a novel framework to simultaneously seek a two-stage generative model and a semantic dictionary to connect visual features with their semantics under a low-rank embedding. Our first-stage generative model is able to augment more semantic features for the unseen classes, which are then used to generate more discriminant visual features in the second stage, to expand the seen visual feature space. Therefore, we will be able to seek a better semantic dictionary to constitute the latent basis for the unseen classes based on the augmented semantic and visual data. Finally, our approach could capture a variety of visual characteristics from seen classes that are “ready-to-use” for new classes. Extensive experiments on four zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kinship verification is a very important technique in many real-world applications, e.g., personal album organization, missing person investigation and forensic analysis. However, it is extremely difficult to verify a family pair with generation gap, e.g., father and son, since there exist both age gap and identity variation. It is essential to well fight off such challenges to achieve promising kinship verification performance. To this end, we propose a towards-young cross-generation model for effective kinship verification by mitigating both age and identity divergences. Specifically, we explore a conditional generative model to bring in an intermediate domain to bridge each pair. Thus, we could extract more effective features through deep architectures with a newly-designed Sparse Discriminative Metric Loss (SDM-Loss), which is exploited to involve the positive and negative information. Experimental results on kinship benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model by comparing with the state-of-the-art kinship verification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metric learning has attracted significant attention in the past decades, because of its appealing advances in various real-world tasks, e.g., person re-identification and face recognition. Traditional supervised metric learning attempts to seek a discriminative metric, which could minimize the pairwise distance of within-class data samples, while maximizing the pairwise distance of data samples from various classes. However, it is still a challenge to build a robust and discriminative metric, especially for corrupted data in the real-world application. In this paper, we propose a Robust Discriminative Metric Learning algorithm through fast low-rank representation and denoising strategy. To be specific, the metric learning problem is guided by a discriminative regularization by incorporating the pair-wise or class-wise information. Moreover, the low-rank basis learning is jointly optimized with the metric to better uncover the global data structure and remove noise. Furthermore, the fast low-rank representation is implemented to mitigate the computational burden and ensure the scalability on large-scale datasets. Finally, we evaluate our learned metric on several challenging tasks, e.g., face recognition/verification, object recognition, image clustering, and person re-identification. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in comparison to many metric learning algorithms, even deep learning ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the recent successes of deep architecture, the auto-encoder and its variants have been intensively explored on image clustering and classification tasks by learning effective feature representations. Conventional auto-encoder attempts to uncover the data’s intrinsic structure, by constraining the output to be as much identical to the input as possible, which denotes that the hidden representation could faithfully reconstruct the input data. One issue that arises, however, is that such representations might not be optimized for specific tasks, e.g., image classification and clustering, since it compresses not only the discriminative information but also a lot of redundant or even noise within data. In other words, not all hidden units would benefit the specific tasks, while partial units are mainly used to represent the task-irrelevant patterns. In this paper, a general framework named discerning feature supported encoder (DFSE) is proposed, which integrates the auto-encoder and feature selection together into a unified model. Specifically, the feature selection is adapted to learned hidden-layer features to capture the task-relevant ones from the task-irrelevant ones. Meanwhile, the selected hidden units could in turn encode more discriminability only on the selected task-relevant units. To this end, our proposed algorithm can generate more effective image representation by distinguishing the task-relevant features from the task-irrelevant ones. Two scenarios of the experiments on image classification and clustering are conducted to evaluate our algorithm. The experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our method can achieve better performance over the state-of-the-art approaches in two scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-view data are very popular contemporarily, as different viewpoints or sensors attempt to richly represent data in various views. However, the cross-view data from different views present a significant divergence, that is, cross-view data from the same category have a lower similarity than those in different categories but within the same view. Considering that each cross-view sample is drawn from two intertwined manifold structures, i.e., class manifold and view manifold, in this paper, we propose a robust cross-view learning framework to seek a robust view-invariant low-dimensional space. Specifically, we develop a dual low-rank decomposition technique to unweave those intertwined manifold structures from one another in the learned space. Moreover, we design two discriminative graphs to constrain the dual low-rank decompositions by fully exploring the prior knowledge. Thus, our proposed algorithm is able to capture more within-class knowledge and mitigate the view divergence to obtain a more effective view-invariant feature extractor. Furthermore, our proposed method is very flexible in addressing such a challenging cross-view learning scenario that we only obtain the view information of the training data while with the view information of the evaluation data unknown. Experiments on face and object benchmarks demonstrate the effective performance of our designed model over the state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domain adaptation is a promising technique when addressing limited or no labeled target data by borrowing well-labeled knowledge from the auxiliary source data. Recently, researchers have exploited multi-layer structures for discriminative feature learning to reduce the domain discrepancy. However, there are limited research efforts on simultaneously building a deep structure and a discriminative classifier over both labeled source and unlabeled target. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised deep domain adaptation framework, in which the multi-layer feature extractor and a multi-class classifier are jointly learned to benefit from each other. Specifically, we develop a novel semi-supervised class-wise adaptation manner to fight off the conditional distribution mismatch between two domains by assigning a probabilistic label to each target sample, i.e., multiple class labels with different probabilities. Furthermore, a multi-class classifier is simultaneously trained on labeled source and unlabeled target samples in a semi-supervised fashion. In this way, the deep structure can formally alleviate the domain divergence and enhance the feature transferability. Experimental evaluations on several standard cross-domain benchmarks verify the superiority of our proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domain adaptation manages to build an effective target classifier or regression model for unlabeled target data by utilizing the well-labeled source data but lying different distributions. Intuitively, to address domain shift problem, it is crucial to learn domain invariant features across domains, and most existing approaches have concentrated on it. However, they often do not directly constrain the learned features to be class discriminative for both source and target data, which is of vital importance for the final classification. Therefore, in this paper, we put forward a novel feature learning method for domain adaptation to construct both domain invariant and class discriminative representations, referred to as DICD. Specifically, DICD is to learn a latent feature space with important data properties preserved, which reduces the domain difference by jointly matching the marginal and class-conditional distributions of both domains, and simultaneously maximizes the inter-class dispersion and minimizes the intra-class scatter as much as possible. Experiments in this paper have demonstrated that the class discriminative properties will dramatically alleviate the cross-domain distribution inconsistency, which further boosts the classification performance. Moreover, we show that exploring both domain invariance and class discriminativeness of the learned representations can be integrated into one optimization framework, and the optimal solution can be derived effectively by solving a generalized eigen-decomposition problem. Comprehensive experiments on several visual cross-domain classification tasks verify that DICD can outperform the competitors significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The graph-based subspace segmentation technique has garnered a lot of attention in the visual data representation problem. In general, data (e.g., tracks of moving objects) are drawn from multiple linear subspaces. Thus, how to build a block-diagonal affinity matrix is the critical problem. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based method, Ensemble Subspace Segmentation under Blockwise constraints (ESSB), which unifies least squares regression and a locality preserving graph regularizer into an ensemble learning framework. Specifically, compact encoding using least squares regression coefficients helps achieve a block-diagonal representation matrix among all samples. Meanwhile, the locality preserving regularizer tends to capture the intrinsic local structure, which further enhances the block-diagonal property. Both the blockwise efforts, i.e., least squares regression and the sparse regularizer, work jointly and are formulated in the ensemble learning framework, making ESSB more robust and efficient, especially when handling high-dimensional data. Finally, an efficient optimization solution based on inexact augmented Lagrange multiplier is derived with theoretical time complexity analysis. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we consider three different applications: face clustering, object clustering, and motion segmentation. Extensive results of both accuracy and normalized mutual information on four benchmarks, i.e., YaleB, ORL, COIL and Hopkins155, are reported. Also, the evaluations of computational cost are provided, based on which the superiority of our proposed method in both accuracy and efficiency is demonstrated compared with 12 baseline algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have proposed various machine learning algorithms for traffic sign recognition, which is a supervised multicategory classification problem with unbalanced class frequencies and various appearances. We present a novel graph embedding algorithm that strikes a balance between local manifold structures and global discriminative information. A novel graph structure is designed to depict explicitly the local manifold structures of traffic signs with various appearances and to intuitively model between-class discriminative information. Through this graph structure, our algorithm effectively learns a compact and discriminative subspace. Moreover, by using L2, 1-norm, the proposed algorithm can preserve the sparse representation property in the original space after graph embedding, thereby generating a more accurate projection matrix. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm exhibits better performance than the recent state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]