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Online gambling platforms have transformed the gambling landscape, offering unprecedented accessibility and personalized experiences. However, these same characteristics have increased the risk of gambling-related harm, affecting individuals, families, and communities. Structural factors, including targeted marketing, shifting social norms, and gaps in regulation, further complicate the challenge. This narrative review examines how artificial intelligence, particularly multimodal generative models and foundation technologies, can address these issues by supporting prevention, early identification, and harm-reduction efforts. We detail applications such as synthetic data generation to overcome research barriers, customized interventions to guide safer behaviors, gamified tools to support recovery, and scenario modeling to inform effective policies. Throughout, we emphasize the importance of safeguarding privacy and ensuring that technological advances are responsibly aligned with public health objectives.

Generative Artificial Intelligence is set to revolutionize healthcare delivery by transforming traditional patient care into a more personalized, efficient, and proactive process. Chatbots, serving as interactive conversational models, will probably drive this patient-centered transformation in healthcare. Through the provision of various services, including diagnosis, personalized lifestyle recommendations, and mental health support, the objective is to substantially augment patient health outcomes, all the while mitigating the workload burden on healthcare providers. The life-critical nature of healthcare applications necessitates establishing a unified and comprehensive set of evaluation metrics for conversational models. Existing evaluation metrics proposed for various generic large language models (LLMs) demonstrate a lack of comprehension regarding medical and health concepts and their significance in promoting patients' well-being. Moreover, these metrics neglect pivotal user-centered aspects, including trust-building, ethics, personalization, empathy, user comprehension, and emotional support. The purpose of this paper is to explore state-of-the-art LLM-based evaluation metrics that are specifically applicable to the assessment of interactive conversational models in healthcare. Subsequently, we present an comprehensive set of evaluation metrics designed to thoroughly assess the performance of healthcare chatbots from an end-user perspective. These metrics encompass an evaluation of language processing abilities, impact on real-world clinical tasks, and effectiveness in user-interactive conversations. Finally, we engage in a discussion concerning the challenges associated with defining and implementing these metrics, with particular emphasis on confounding factors such as the target audience, evaluation methods, and prompt techniques involved in the evaluation process., Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, journal paper

We introduce Affective Visual Dialog, an emotion explanation and reasoning task as a testbed for research on understanding the formation of emotions in visually grounded conversations. The task involves three skills: (1) Dialog-based Question Answering (2) Dialog-based Emotion Prediction and (3) Affective emotion explanation generation based on the dialog. Our key contribution is the collection of a large-scale dataset, dubbed AffectVisDial, consisting of 50K 10-turn visually grounded dialogs as well as concluding emotion attributions and dialog-informed textual emotion explanations, resulting in a total of 27,180 working hours. We explain our design decisions in collecting the dataset and introduce the questioner and answerer tasks that are associated with the participants in the conversation. We train and demonstrate solid Affective Visual Dialog baselines adapted from state-of-the-art models. Remarkably, the responses generated by our models show promising emotional reasoning abilities in response to visually grounded conversations. Our project page is available at https://affective-visual-dialog.github.io.

To determine if a convolutional neural network (CNN) deep learning model can accurately segment acute ischemic changes on non-contrast CT compared to neuroradiologists. Non-contrast CT (NCCT) examinations from 232 acute ischemic stroke patients who were enrolled in the DEFUSE 3 trial were included in this study. Three experienced neuroradiologists independently segmented hypodensity that reflected the ischemic core on each scan. The neuroradiologist with the most experience (expert A) served as the ground truth for deep learning model training. Two additional neuroradiologists (experts B and C) segmentations were used for data testing. The 232 studies were randomly split into training and test sets. The training set was further randomly divided into 5 folds with training and validation sets. A 3-dimensional CNN architecture was trained and optimized to predict the segmentations of expert A from NCCT. The performance of the model was assessed using a set of volume, overlap, and distance metrics using non-inferiority thresholds of 20%, 3ml, and 3mm. The optimized model trained on expert A was compared to test experts B and C. We used a one-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test to test for the non-inferiority of the model-expert compared to the inter-expert agreement. The final model performance for the ischemic core segmentation task reached a performance of 0.46+-0.09 Surface Dice at Tolerance 5mm and 0.47+-0.13 Dice when trained on expert A. Compared to the two test neuroradiologists the model-expert agreement was non-inferior to the inter-expert agreement, p < 0.05. The CNN accurately delineates the hypodense ischemic core on NCCT in acute ischemic stroke patients with an accuracy comparable to neuroradiologists.

Performance metrics for medical image segmentation models are used to measure the agreement between the reference annotation and the predicted segmentation. Usually, overlap metrics, such as the Dice, are used as a metric to evaluate the performance of these models in order for results to be comparable. However, there is a mismatch between the distributions of cases and difficulty level of segmentation tasks in public data sets compared to clinical practice. Common metrics fail to measure the impact of this mismatch, especially for clinical data sets that include low signal pathologies, a difficult segmentation task, and uncertain, small, or empty reference annotations. This limitation may result in ineffective research of machine learning practitioners in designing and optimizing models. Dimensions of evaluating clinical value include consideration of the uncertainty of reference annotations, independence from reference annotation volume size, and evaluation of classification of empty reference annotations. We study how uncertain, small, and empty reference annotations influence the value of metrics for medical image segmentation on an in-house data set regardless of the model. We examine metrics behavior on the predictions of a standard deep learning framework in order to identify metrics with clinical value. We compare to a public benchmark data set (BraTS 2019) with a high-signal pathology and certain, larger, and no empty reference annotations. We may show machine learning practitioners, how uncertain, small, or empty reference annotations require a rethinking of the evaluation and optimizing procedures. The evaluation code was released to encourage further analysis of this topic. https://github.com/SophieOstmeier/UncertainSmallEmpty.git, Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, Published in Medical Image Analysis

Active learning is an important technology for automated machine learning systems. In contrast to Neural Architecture Search (NAS) which aims at automating neural network architecture design, active learning aims at automating training data selection. It is especially critical for training a long-tailed task, in which positive samples are sparsely distributed. Active learning alleviates the expensive data annotation issue through incrementally training models powered with efficient data selection. Instead of annotating all unlabeled samples, it iteratively selects and annotates the most valuable samples. Active learning has been popular in image classification, but has not been fully explored in object detection. Most of current approaches on object detection are evaluated with different settings, making it difficult to fairly compare their performance. To facilitate the research in this field, this paper contributes an active learning benchmark framework named as ALBench for evaluating active learning in object detection. Developed on an automatic deep model training system, this ALBench framework is easy-to-use, compatible with different active learning algorithms, and ensures the same training and testing protocols. We hope this automated benchmark system help researchers to easily reproduce literature's performance and have objective comparisons with prior arts. The code will be release through Github.

This paper introduces an open source platform to support the rapid development of computer vision applications at scale. The platform puts the efficient data development at the center of the machine learning development process, integrates active learning methods, data and model version control, and uses concepts such as projects to enable fast iterations of multiple task specific datasets in parallel. This platform abstracts the development process into core states and operations, and integrates third party tools via open APIs as implementations of the operations. This open design reduces the development cost and adoption cost for ML teams with existing tools. At the same time, the platform supports recording project development histories, through which successful projects can be shared to further boost model production efficiency on similar tasks. The platform is open source and is already used internally to meet the increasing demand for different real world computer vision applications.

This paper explores object detection in the small data regime, where only a limited number of annotated bounding boxes are available due to data rarity and annotation expense. This is a common challenge today with machine learning being applied to many new tasks where obtaining training data is more challenging, e.g. in medical images with rare diseases that doctors sometimes only see once in their life-time. In this work we explore this problem from a generative modeling perspective by learning to generate new images with associated bounding boxes, and using these for training an object detector. We show that simply training previously proposed generative models does not yield satisfactory performance due to them optimizing for image realism rather than object detection accuracy. To this end we develop a new model with a novel unrolling mechanism that jointly optimizes the generative model and a detector such that the generated images improve the performance of the detector. We show this method outperforms the state of the art on two challenging datasets, disease detection and small data pedestrian detection, improving the average precision on NIH Chest X-ray by a relative 20% and localization accuracy by a relative 50%., Comment: Published in ICCV 2019

Multi-task learning holds the promise of less data, parameters, and time than training of separate models. We propose a method to automatically search over multi-task architectures while taking resource constraints into consideration. We propose a search space that compactly represents different parameter sharing strategies. This provides more effective coverage and sampling of the space of multi-task architectures. We also present a method for quick evaluation of different architectures by using feature distillation. Together these contributions allow us to quickly optimize for efficient multi-task models. We benchmark on Visual Decathlon, demonstrating that we can automatically search for and identify multi-task architectures that effectively make trade-offs between task resource requirements while achieving a high level of final performance.

In this paper, we study the task of image retrieval, where the input query is specified in the form of an image plus some text that describes desired modifications to the input image. For example, we may present an image of the Eiffel tower, and ask the system to find images which are visually similar but are modified in small ways, such as being taken at nighttime instead of during the day. To tackle this task, we learn a similarity metric between a target image and a source image plus source text, an embedding and composing function such that target image feature is close to the source image plus text composition feature. We propose a new way to combine image and text using such function that is designed for the retrieval task. We show this outperforms existing approaches on 3 different datasets, namely Fashion-200k, MIT-States and a new synthetic dataset we create based on CLEVR. We also show that our approach can be used to classify input queries, in addition to image retrieval.

As the senior population rapidly increases, it is challenging yet crucial to provide effective long-term care for seniors who live at home or in senior care facilities. Smart senior homes, which have gained widespread interest in the healthcare community, have been proposed to improve the well-being of seniors living independently. In particular, non-intrusive, cost-effective sensors placed in these senior homes enable gait characterization, which can provide clinically relevant information including mobility level and early neurodegenerative disease risk. In this paper, we present a method to perform gait analysis from a single camera placed within the home. We show that we can accurately calculate various gait parameters, demonstrating the potential for our system to monitor the long-term gait of seniors and thus aid clinicians in understanding a patient's medical profile., Comment: Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) Workshop at NeurIPS 2018 arXiv:1811.07216

The labeling cost of large number of bounding boxes is one of the main challenges for training modern object detectors. To reduce the dependence on expensive bounding box annotations, we propose a new semi-supervised object detection formulation, in which a few seed box level annotations and a large scale of image level annotations are used to train the detector. We adopt a training-mining framework, which is widely used in weakly supervised object detection tasks. However, the mining process inherently introduces various kinds of labelling noises: false negatives, false positives and inaccurate boundaries, which can be harmful for training the standard object detectors (e.g. Faster RCNN). We propose a novel NOise Tolerant Ensemble RCNN (NOTE-RCNN) object detector to handle such noisy labels. Comparing to standard Faster RCNN, it contains three highlights: an ensemble of two classification heads and a distillation head to avoid overfitting on noisy labels and improve the mining precision, masking the negative sample loss in box predictor to avoid the harm of false negative labels, and training box regression head only on seed annotations to eliminate the harm from inaccurate boundaries of mined bounding boxes. We evaluate the methods on ILSVRC 2013 and MSCOCO 2017 dataset; we observe that the detection accuracy consistently improves as we iterate between mining and training steps, and state-of-the-art performance is achieved., Comment: 8 pages

Recent insights on language and vision with neural networks have been successfully applied to simple single-image visual question answering. However, to tackle real-life question answering problems on multimedia collections such as personal photos, we have to look at whole collections with sequences of photos or videos. When answering questions from a large collection, a natural problem is to identify snippets to support the answer. In this paper, we describe a novel neural network called Focal Visual-Text Attention network (FVTA) for collective reasoning in visual question answering, where both visual and text sequence information such as images and text metadata are presented. FVTA introduces an end-to-end approach that makes use of a hierarchical process to dynamically determine what media and what time to focus on in the sequential data to answer the question. FVTA can not only answer the questions well but also provides the justifications which the system results are based upon to get the answers. FVTA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MemexQA dataset and competitive results on the MovieQA dataset., Comment: In CVPR 2018. Code, models and dataset are available here: https://memexqa.cs.cmu.edu/

We present a novel framework for iterative visual reasoning. Our framework goes beyond current recognition systems that lack the capability to reason beyond stack of convolutions. The framework consists of two core modules: a local module that uses spatial memory to store previous beliefs with parallel updates; and a global graph-reasoning module. Our graph module has three components: a) a knowledge graph where we represent classes as nodes and build edges to encode different types of semantic relationships between them; b) a region graph of the current image where regions in the image are nodes and spatial relationships between these regions are edges; c) an assignment graph that assigns regions to classes. Both the local module and the global module roll-out iteratively and cross-feed predictions to each other to refine estimates. The final predictions are made by combining the best of both modules with an attention mechanism. We show strong performance over plain ConvNets, \eg achieving an $8.4\%$ absolute improvement on ADE measured by per-class average precision. Analysis also shows that the framework is resilient to missing regions for reasoning., Comment: CVPR 2018

Recently popularized graph neural networks achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy on a number of standard benchmark datasets for graph-based semi-supervised learning, improving significantly over existing approaches. These architectures alternate between a propagation layer that aggregates the hidden states of the local neighborhood and a fully-connected layer. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that a linear model, that removes all the intermediate fully-connected layers, is still able to achieve a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art models. This significantly reduces the number of parameters, which is critical for semi-supervised learning where number of labeled examples are small. This in turn allows a room for designing more innovative propagation layers. Based on this insight, we propose a novel graph neural network that removes all the intermediate fully-connected layers, and replaces the propagation layers with attention mechanisms that respect the structure of the graph. The attention mechanism allows us to learn a dynamic and adaptive local summary of the neighborhood to achieve more accurate predictions. In a number of experiments on benchmark citation networks datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms competing methods. By examining the attention weights among neighbors, we show that our model provides some interesting insights on how neighbors influence each other.

Model compression is a critical technique to efficiently deploy neural network models on mobile devices which have limited computation resources and tight power budgets. Conventional model compression techniques rely on hand-crafted heuristics and rule-based policies that require domain experts to explore the large design space trading off among model size, speed, and accuracy, which is usually sub-optimal and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose AutoML for Model Compression (AMC) which leverage reinforcement learning to provide the model compression policy. This learning-based compression policy outperforms conventional rule-based compression policy by having higher compression ratio, better preserving the accuracy and freeing human labor. Under 4x FLOPs reduction, we achieved 2.7% better accuracy than the handcrafted model compression policy for VGG-16 on ImageNet. We applied this automated, push-the-button compression pipeline to MobileNet and achieved 1.81x speedup of measured inference latency on an Android phone and 1.43x speedup on the Titan XP GPU, with only 0.1% loss of ImageNet Top-1 accuracy.

Recent deep networks are capable of memorizing the entire data even when the labels are completely random. To overcome the overfitting on corrupted labels, we propose a novel technique of learning another neural network, called MentorNet, to supervise the training of the base deep networks, namely, StudentNet. During training, MentorNet provides a curriculum (sample weighting scheme) for StudentNet to focus on the sample the label of which is probably correct. Unlike the existing curriculum that is usually predefined by human experts, MentorNet learns a data-driven curriculum dynamically with StudentNet. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve the generalization performance of deep networks trained on corrupted training data. Notably, to the best of our knowledge, we achieve the best-published result on WebVision, a large benchmark containing 2.2 million images of real-world noisy labels. The code are at https://github.com/google/mentornet

We propose a new method for learning the structure of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that is more efficient than recent state-of-the-art methods based on reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithms. Our approach uses a sequential model-based optimization (SMBO) strategy, in which we search for structures in order of increasing complexity, while simultaneously learning a surrogate model to guide the search through structure space. Direct comparison under the same search space shows that our method is up to 5 times more efficient than the RL method of Zoph et al. (2018) in terms of number of models evaluated, and 8 times faster in terms of total compute. The structures we discover in this way achieve state of the art classification accuracies on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet., Comment: To appear in ECCV 2018 as oral. The code and checkpoint for PNASNet-5 trained on ImageNet (both Mobile and Large) can now be downloaded from https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/slim#Pretrained. Also see https://github.com/chenxi116/PNASNet.TF for refactored and simplified TensorFlow code; see https://github.com/chenxi116/PNASNet.pytorch for exact conversion to PyTorch

Accurate identification and localization of abnormalities from radiology images play an integral part in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. Building a highly accurate prediction model for these tasks usually requires a large number of images manually annotated with labels and finding sites of abnormalities. In reality, however, such annotated data are expensive to acquire, especially the ones with location annotations. We need methods that can work well with only a small amount of location annotations. To address this challenge, we present a unified approach that simultaneously performs disease identification and localization through the same underlying model for all images. We demonstrate that our approach can effectively leverage both class information as well as limited location annotation, and significantly outperforms the comparative reference baseline in both classification and localization tasks., Comment: Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2018 (CVPR 2018). V1: CVPR submission; V2: +supplementary; V3: CVPR camera-ready; V4: correction, update reference baseline results according to their latest post; V5: minor correction; V6: Identification results using NIH data splits and various image models

Image captioning is a challenging problem owing to the complexity in understanding the image content and diverse ways of describing it in natural language. Recent advances in deep neural networks have substantially improved the performance of this task. Most state-of-the-art approaches follow an encoder-decoder framework, which generates captions using a sequential recurrent prediction model. However, in this paper, we introduce a novel decision-making framework for image captioning. We utilize a "policy network" and a "value network" to collaboratively generate captions. The policy network serves as a local guidance by providing the confidence of predicting the next word according to the current state. Additionally, the value network serves as a global and lookahead guidance by evaluating all possible extensions of the current state. In essence, it adjusts the goal of predicting the correct words towards the goal of generating captions similar to the ground truth captions. We train both networks using an actor-critic reinforcement learning model, with a novel reward defined by visual-semantic embedding. Extensive experiments and analyses on the Microsoft COCO dataset show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across different evaluation metrics.

The ability of learning from noisy labels is very useful in many visual recognition tasks, as a vast amount of data with noisy labels are relatively easy to obtain. Traditionally, the label noises have been treated as statistical outliers, and approaches such as importance re-weighting and bootstrap have been proposed to alleviate the problem. According to our observation, the real-world noisy labels exhibit multi-mode characteristics as the true labels, rather than behaving like independent random outliers. In this work, we propose a unified distillation framework to use side information, including a small clean dataset and label relations in knowledge graph, to "hedge the risk" of learning from noisy labels. Furthermore, unlike the traditional approaches evaluated based on simulated label noises, we propose a suite of new benchmark datasets, in Sports, Species and Artifacts domains, to evaluate the task of learning from noisy labels in the practical setting. The empirical study demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method in all the domains.

Dense captioning is a newly emerging computer vision topic for understanding images with dense language descriptions. The goal is to densely detect visual concepts (e.g., objects, object parts, and interactions between them) from images, labeling each with a short descriptive phrase. We identify two key challenges of dense captioning that need to be properly addressed when tackling the problem. First, dense visual concept annotations in each image are associated with highly overlapping target regions, making accurate localization of each visual concept challenging. Second, the large amount of visual concepts makes it hard to recognize each of them by appearance alone. We propose a new model pipeline based on two novel ideas, joint inference and context fusion, to alleviate these two challenges. We design our model architecture in a methodical manner and thoroughly evaluate the variations in architecture. Our final model, compact and efficient, achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on Visual Genome for dense captioning with a relative gain of 73\% compared to the previous best algorithm. Qualitative experiments also reveal the semantic capabilities of our model in dense captioning.

Despite progress in perceptual tasks such as image classification, computers still perform poorly on cognitive tasks such as image description and question answering. Cognition is core to tasks that involve not just recognizing, but reasoning about our visual world. However, models used to tackle the rich content in images for cognitive tasks are still being trained using the same datasets designed for perceptual tasks. To achieve success at cognitive tasks, models need to understand the interactions and relationships between objects in an image. When asked "What vehicle is the person riding?", computers will need to identify the objects in an image as well as the relationships riding(man, carriage) and pulling(horse, carriage) in order to answer correctly that "the person is riding a horse-drawn carriage". In this paper, we present the Visual Genome dataset to enable the modeling of such relationships. We collect dense annotations of objects, attributes, and relationships within each image to learn these models. Specifically, our dataset contains over 100K images where each image has an average of 21 objects, 18 attributes, and 18 pairwise relationships between objects. We canonicalize the objects, attributes, relationships, and noun phrases in region descriptions and questions answer pairs to WordNet synsets. Together, these annotations represent the densest and largest dataset of image descriptions, objects, attributes, relationships, and question answers., Comment: 44 pages, 37 figures

We present the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million Dataset (YFCC100M), the largest public multimedia collection that has ever been released. The dataset contains a total of 100 million media objects, of which approximately 99.2 million are photos and 0.8 million are videos, all of which carry a Creative Commons license. Each media object in the dataset is represented by several pieces of metadata, e.g. Flickr identifier, owner name, camera, title, tags, geo, media source. The collection provides a comprehensive snapshot of how photos and videos were taken, described, and shared over the years, from the inception of Flickr in 2004 until early 2014. In this article we explain the rationale behind its creation, as well as the implications the dataset has for science, research, engineering, and development. We further present several new challenges in multimedia research that can now be expanded upon with our dataset.

In this paper we consider the problem of multi-view face detection. While there has been significant research on this problem, current state-of-the-art approaches for this task require annotation of facial landmarks, e.g. TSM [25], or annotation of face poses [28, 22]. They also require training dozens of models to fully capture faces in all orientations, e.g. 22 models in HeadHunter method [22]. In this paper we propose Deep Dense Face Detector (DDFD), a method that does not require pose/landmark annotation and is able to detect faces in a wide range of orientations using a single model based on deep convolutional neural networks. The proposed method has minimal complexity; unlike other recent deep learning object detection methods [9], it does not require additional components such as segmentation, bounding-box regression, or SVM classifiers. Furthermore, we analyzed scores of the proposed face detector for faces in different orientations and found that 1) the proposed method is able to detect faces from different angles and can handle occlusion to some extent, 2) there seems to be a correlation between dis- tribution of positive examples in the training set and scores of the proposed face detector. The latter suggests that the proposed methods performance can be further improved by using better sampling strategies and more sophisticated data augmentation techniques. Evaluations on popular face detection benchmark datasets show that our single-model face detector algorithm has similar or better performance compared to the previous methods, which are more complex and require annotations of either different poses or facial landmarks., Comment: in International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval 2015 (ICMR)

Images have become one of the most popular types of media through which users convey their emotions within online social networks. Although vast amount of research is devoted to sentiment analysis of textual data, there has been very limited work that focuses on analyzing sentiment of image data. In this work, we propose a novel visual sentiment prediction framework that performs image understanding with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Specifically, the proposed sentiment prediction framework performs transfer learning from a CNN with millions of parameters, which is pre-trained on large-scale data for object recognition. Experiments conducted on two real-world datasets from Twitter and Tumblr demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed visual sentiment analysis framework.

Multi-label learning deals with the classification problems where each instance can be assigned with multiple labels simultaneously. Conventional multi-label learning approaches mainly focus on exploiting label correlations. It is usually assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that the label sets for training instances are fully labeled without any missing labels. However, in many real-world multi-label datasets, the label assignments for training instances can be incomplete. Some ground-truth labels can be missed by the labeler from the label set. This problem is especially typical when the number instances is very large, and the labeling cost is very high, which makes it almost impossible to get a fully labeled training set. In this paper, we study the problem of large-scale multi-label learning with incomplete label assignments. We propose an approach, called MPU, based upon positive and unlabeled stochastic gradient descent and stacked models. Unlike prior works, our method can effectively and efficiently consider missing labels and label correlations simultaneously, and is very scalable, that has linear time complexities over the size of the data. Extensive experiments on two real-world multi-label datasets show that our MPU model consistently outperform other commonly-used baselines.