The research explores the potential of quantum deep learning models to address challenging machine learning problems that classical deep learning models find difficult to tackle. We introduce a novel model architecture that combines classical convolutional layers with a quantum neural network, aiming to surpass state-of-the-art accuracy while maintaining a compact model size. The experiment is to classify high-dimensional audio data from the Bird-CLEF 2021 dataset. Our evaluation focuses on key metrics, including training duration, model accuracy, and total model size. This research demonstrates the promising potential of quantum machine learning in enhancing machine learning tasks and solving practical machine learning challenges available today.
Image Classification is a fundamental task in the field of computer vision that frequently serves as a benchmark for gauging advancements in Computer Vision. Over the past few years, significant progress has been made in image classification due to the emergence of deep learning. However, challenges still exist, such as modeling fine-grained visual information, high computation costs, the parallelism of the model, and inconsistent evaluation protocols across datasets. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of existing papers on Vision Transformers for image classification. We first introduce the popular image classification datasets that influenced the design of models. Then, we present Vision Transformers models in chronological order, starting with early attempts at adapting attention mechanism to vision tasks followed by the adoption of vision transformers, as they have demonstrated success in capturing intricate patterns and long-range dependencies within images. Finally, we discuss open problems and shed light on opportunities for image classification to facilitate new research ideas.
Despite the prevalence of pretrained language models in natural language understanding tasks, understanding lengthy text such as document is still challenging due to the data sparseness problem. Inspired by that humans develop their ability of understanding lengthy text from reading shorter text, we propose a simple yet effective summarization-based data augmentation, SUMMaug, for document classification. We first obtain easy-to-learn examples for the target document classification task by summarizing the input of the original training examples, while optionally merging the original labels to conform to the summarized input. We then use the generated pseudo examples to perform curriculum learning. Experimental results on two datasets confirmed the advantage of our method compared to existing baseline methods in terms of robustness and accuracy. We release our code and data at https://github.com/etsurin/summaug.
Active learning aims to enhance model performance by strategically labeling informative data points. While extensively studied, its effectiveness on large-scale, real-world datasets remains underexplored. Existing research primarily focuses on single-source data, ignoring the multi-domain nature of real-world data. We introduce a multi-domain active learning benchmark to bridge this gap. Our benchmark demonstrates that traditional single-domain active learning strategies are often less effective than random selection in multi-domain scenarios. We also introduce CLIP-GeoYFCC, a novel large-scale image dataset built around geographical domains, in contrast to existing genre-based domain datasets. Analysis on our benchmark shows that all multi-domain strategies exhibit significant tradeoffs, with no strategy outperforming across all datasets or all metrics, emphasizing the need for future research.
After pre-training by generating the next word conditional on previous words, the Language Model (LM) acquires the ability of In-Context Learning (ICL) that can learn a new task conditional on the context of the given in-context examples (ICEs). Similarly, visually-conditioned Language Modelling is also used to train Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with ICL ability. However, such VLMs typically exhibit weaker classification abilities compared to contrastive learning-based models like CLIP, since the Language Modelling objective does not directly contrast whether an object is paired with a text. To improve the ICL of classification, using more ICEs to provide more knowledge is a straightforward way. However, this may largely increase the selection time, and more importantly, the inclusion of additional in-context images tends to extend the length of the in-context sequence beyond the processing capacity of a VLM. To alleviate these limitations, we propose to manipulate the label space of each ICE to increase its knowledge density, allowing for fewer ICEs to convey as much information as a larger set would. Specifically, we propose two strategies which are Label Distribution Enhancement and Visual Descriptions Enhancement to improve In-context classification performance on diverse datasets, including the classic ImageNet and more fine-grained datasets like CUB-200. Specifically, using our approach on ImageNet, we increase accuracy from 74.70\% in a 4-shot setting to 76.21\% with just 2 shots. surpassing CLIP by 0.67\%. On CUB-200, our method raises 1-shot accuracy from 48.86\% to 69.05\%, 12.15\% higher than CLIP. The code is given in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MLS_ICC.
In the backdrop of increasing data requirements of Deep Neural Networks for object recognition that is growing more untenable by the day, we present Developmental PreTraining (DPT) as a possible solution. DPT is designed as a curriculum-based pre-training approach designed to rival traditional pre-training techniques that are data-hungry. These training approaches also introduce unnecessary features that could be misleading when the network is employed in a downstream classification task where the data is sufficiently different from the pre-training data and is scarce. We design the curriculum for DPT by drawing inspiration from human infant visual development. DPT employs a phased approach where carefully-selected primitive and universal features like edges and shapes are taught to the network participating in our pre-training regime. A model that underwent the DPT regime is tested against models with randomised weights to evaluate the viability of DPT.
Normalization techniques have been widely used in the field of deep learning due to their capability of enabling higher learning rates and are less careful in initialization. However, the effectiveness of popular normalization technologies is typically limited to specific areas. Unlike the standard Batch Normalization (BN) and Layer Normalization (LN), where BN computes the mean and variance along the (N,H,W) dimensions and LN computes the mean and variance along the (C,H,W) dimensions (N, C, H and W are the batch, channel, spatial height and width dimension, respectively), this paper presents a novel normalization technique called Batch Channel Normalization (BCN). To exploit both the channel and batch dependence and adaptively and combine the advantages of BN and LN based on specific datasets or tasks, BCN separately normalizes inputs along the (N, H, W) and (C, H, W) axes, then combines the normalized outputs based on adaptive parameters. As a basic block, BCN can be easily integrated into existing models for various applications in the field of computer vision. Empirical results show that the proposed technique can be seamlessly applied to various versions of CNN or Vision Transformer architecture. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AfifaKhaled/BatchChannel-Normalization
There is a growing demand for explainable, transparent, and data-driven models within the domain of fraud detection. Decisions made by fraud detection models need to be explainable in the event of a customer dispute. Additionally, the decision-making process in the model must be transparent to win the trust of regulators and business stakeholders. At the same time, fraud detection solutions can benefit from data due to the noisy, dynamic nature of fraud and the availability of large historical data sets. Finally, fraud detection is notorious for its class imbalance: there are typically several orders of magnitude more legitimate transactions than fraudulent ones. In this paper, we present Deep Symbolic Classification (DSC), an extension of the Deep Symbolic Regression framework to classification problems. DSC casts classification as a search problem in the space of all analytic functions composed of a vocabulary of variables, constants, and operations and optimizes for an arbitrary evaluation metric directly. The search is guided by a deep neural network trained with reinforcement learning. Because the functions are mathematical expressions that are in closed-form and concise, the model is inherently explainable both at the level of a single classification decision and the model's decision process. Furthermore, the class imbalance problem is successfully addressed by optimizing for metrics that are robust to class imbalance such as the F1 score. This eliminates the need for oversampling and undersampling techniques that plague traditional approaches. Finally, the model allows to explicitly balance between the prediction accuracy and the explainability. An evaluation on the PaySim data set demonstrates competitive predictive performance with state-of-the-art models, while surpassing them in terms of explainability. This establishes DSC as a promising model for fraud detection systems.
We propose a representation of optimization problem instances using a transformer-based neural network architecture trained for the task of problem classification of the 24 problem classes from the Black-box Optimization Benchmarking (BBOB) benchmark. We show that transformer-based methods can be trained to recognize problem classes with accuracies in the range of 70\%-80\% for different problem dimensions, suggesting the possible application of transformer architectures in acquiring representations for black-box optimization problems.
The notion of margin loss has been central to the development and analysis of algorithms for binary classification. To date, however, there remains no consensus as to the analogue of the margin loss for multiclass classification. In this work, we show that a broad range of multiclass loss functions, including many popular ones, can be expressed in the relative margin form, a generalization of the margin form of binary losses. The relative margin form is broadly useful for understanding and analyzing multiclass losses as shown by our prior work (Wang and Scott, 2020, 2021). To further demonstrate the utility of this way of expressing multiclass losses, we use it to extend the seminal result of Bartlett et al. (2006) on classification-calibration of binary margin losses to multiclass. We then analyze the class of Fenchel-Young losses, and expand the set of these losses that are known to be classification-calibrated.
Modern deep neural networks have achieved great successes in medical image analysis. However, the features captured by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or Transformers tend to be optimized for pixel intensities and neglect key anatomical structures such as connected components and loops. In this paper, we propose a persistent homology guided approach (PHG-Net) that explores topological features of objects for medical image classification. For an input image, we first compute its cubical persistence diagram and extract topological features into a vector representation using a small neural network (called the PH module). The extracted topological features are then incorporated into the feature map generated by CNN or Transformer for feature fusion. The PH module is lightweight and capable of integrating topological features into any CNN or Transformer architectures in an end-to-end fashion. We evaluate our PHG-Net on three public datasets and demonstrate its considerable improvements on the target classification tasks over state-of-the-art methods.
Benefiting from the advancements in deep learning, various genomic analytical techniques, such as survival analysis, classification of tumors and their subtypes, and exploration of specific pathways, have significantly enhanced our understanding of the biological mechanisms driving cancer. However, the overfitting issue, arising from the limited number of patient samples, poses a challenge in improving the accuracy of genome analysis by deepening the neural network. Furthermore, it remains uncertain whether novel approaches such as the sparsely gated mixture of expert (MOE) and self-attention mechanisms can improve the accuracy of genomic analysis. In this paper, we introduce a novel sparsely gated RNA-seq analysis framework called Gene-MOE. This framework exploits the potential of the MOE layers and the proposed mixture of attention expert (MOAE) layers to enhance the analysis accuracy. Additionally, it addresses overfitting challenges by integrating pan-cancer information from 33 distinct cancer types through pre-training.We pre-trained Gene-MOE on TCGA pan-cancer RNA-seq dataset with 33 cancer types. Subsequently, we conducted experiments involving cancer classification and survival analysis based on the pre-trained Gene-MOE. According to the survival analysis results on 14 cancer types, Gene-MOE outperformed state-of-the-art models on 12 cancer types. Through detailed feature analysis, we found that the Gene-MOE model could learn rich feature representations of high-dimensional genes. According to the classification results, the total accuracy of the classification model for 33 cancer classifications reached 95.8%, representing the best performance compared to state-of-the-art models. These results indicate that Gene-MOE holds strong potential for use in cancer classification and survival analysis.
Due to the depth degradation effect in residual connections, many efficient Vision Transformers models that rely on stacking layers for information exchange often fail to form sufficient information mixing, leading to unnatural visual perception. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose Aggregated Attention, a biomimetic design-based token mixer that simulates biological foveal vision and continuous eye movement while enabling each token on the feature map to have a global perception. Furthermore, we incorporate learnable tokens that interact with conventional queries and keys, which further diversifies the generation of affinity matrices beyond merely relying on the similarity between queries and keys. Our approach does not rely on stacking for information exchange, thus effectively avoiding depth degradation and achieving natural visual perception. Additionally, we propose Convolutional GLU, a channel mixer that bridges the gap between GLU and SE mechanism, which empowers each token to have channel attention based on its nearest neighbor image features, enhancing local modeling capability and model robustness. We combine aggregated attention and convolutional GLU to create a new visual backbone called TransNeXt. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TransNeXt achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple model sizes. At a resolution of $224^2$, TransNeXt-Tiny attains an ImageNet accuracy of 84.0%, surpassing ConvNeXt-B with 69% fewer parameters. Our TransNeXt-Base achieves an ImageNet accuracy of 86.2% and an ImageNet-A accuracy of 61.6% at a resolution of $384^2$, a COCO object detection mAP of 57.1, and an ADE20K semantic segmentation mIoU of 54.7.
In this study, we explore the application of Topological Data Analysis (TDA) and Lipschitz-Killing Curvatures (LKCs) as powerful tools for feature extraction and classification in the context of biomedical multiomics problems. TDA allows us to capture topological features and patterns within complex datasets, while LKCs provide essential geometric insights. We investigate the potential of combining both methods to improve classification accuracy. Using a dataset of biomedical images, we demonstrate that TDA and LKCs can effectively extract topological and geometrical features, respectively. The combination of these features results in enhanced classification performance compared to using each method individually. This approach offers promising results and has the potential to advance our understanding of complex biological processes in various biomedical applications. Our findings highlight the value of integrating topological and geometrical information in biomedical data analysis. As we continue to delve into the intricacies of multiomics problems, the fusion of these insights holds great promise for unraveling the underlying biological complexities.
We propose a dual-stream multi-scale vision transformer (DS-MSHViT) architecture that processes RGB and optical flow inputs for efficient sewer defect classification. Unlike existing methods that combine the predictions of two separate networks trained on each modality, we jointly train a single network with two branches for RGB and motion. Our key idea is to use self-attention regularization to harness the complementary strengths of the RGB and motion streams. The motion stream alone struggles to generate accurate attention maps, as motion images lack the rich visual features present in RGB images. To facilitate this, we introduce an attention consistency loss between the dual streams. By leveraging motion cues through a self-attention regularizer, we align and enhance RGB attention maps, enabling the network to concentrate on pertinent input regions. We evaluate our data on a public dataset as well as cross-validate our model performance in a novel dataset. Our method outperforms existing models that utilize either convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or multi-scale hybrid vision transformers (MSHViTs) without employing attention regularization between the two streams.
Vicious assaults, malware, and various ransomware pose a cybersecurity threat, causing considerable damage to computer structures, servers, and mobile and web apps across various industries and businesses. These safety concerns are important and must be addressed immediately. Ransomware detection and classification are critical for guaranteeing rapid reaction and prevention. This study uses the XGBoost classifier and Random Forest (RF) algorithms to detect and classify ransomware attacks. This approach involves analyzing the behaviour of ransomware and extracting relevant features that can help distinguish between different ransomware families. The models are evaluated on a dataset of ransomware attacks and demonstrate their effectiveness in accurately detecting and classifying ransomware. The results show that the XGBoost classifier, Random Forest Classifiers, can effectively detect and classify different ransomware attacks with high accuracy, thereby providing a valuable tool for enhancing cybersecurity.
Deep learning approaches exhibit promising performances on various text tasks. However, they are still struggling on medical text classification since samples are often extremely imbalanced and scarce. Different from existing mainstream approaches that focus on supplementary semantics with external medical information, this paper aims to rethink the data challenges in medical texts and present a novel framework-agnostic algorithm called Text2Tree that only utilizes internal label hierarchy in training deep learning models. We embed the ICD code tree structure of labels into cascade attention modules for learning hierarchy-aware label representations. Two new learning schemes, Similarity Surrogate Learning (SSL) and Dissimilarity Mixup Learning (DML), are devised to boost text classification by reusing and distinguishing samples of other labels following the label representation hierarchy, respectively. Experiments on authoritative public datasets and real-world medical records show that our approach stably achieves superior performances over classical and advanced imbalanced classification methods.
Multi-label classification (MLC) refers to the problem of tagging a given instance with a set of relevant labels. Most existing MLC methods are based on the assumption that the correlation of two labels in each label pair is symmetric, which is violated in many real-world scenarios. Moreover, most existing methods design learning processes associated with the number of labels, which makes their computational complexity a bottleneck when scaling up to large-scale output space. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel method named Scalable Label Distribution Learning (SLDL) for multi-label classification which can describe different labels as distributions in a latent space, where the label correlation is asymmetric and the dimension is independent of the number of labels. Specifically, SLDL first converts labels into continuous distributions within a low-dimensional latent space and leverages the asymmetric metric to establish the correlation between different labels. Then, it learns the mapping from the feature space to the latent space, resulting in the computational complexity is no longer related to the number of labels. Finally, SLDL leverages a nearest-neighbor-based strategy to decode the latent representations and obtain the final predictions. Extensive experiments illustrate that SLDL achieves very competitive classification performances with little computational consumption.
Missing data is a common problem in practical data science settings. Various imputation methods have been developed to deal with missing data. However, even though the labels are available in the training data in many situations, the common practice of imputation usually only relies on the input and ignores the label. We propose Classification Based on MissForest Imputation (CBMI), a classification strategy that initializes the predicted test label with missing values and stacks the label with the input for imputation, allowing the label and the input to be imputed simultaneously. In addition, we propose the imputation using labels (IUL) algorithm, an imputation strategy that stacks the label into the input and illustrates how it can significantly improve the imputation quality. Experiments show that CBMI has classification accuracy when the test set contains missing data, especially for imbalanced data and categorical data. Moreover, for both the regression and classification, IUL consistently shows significantly better results than imputation based on only the input data.
We present the first comprehensive and large-scale evaluation of classical (NN), fuzzy (FNN) and fuzzy rough (FRNN) nearest neighbour classification. We standardise existing proposals for nearest neighbour weighting with kernel functions, applied to the distance values and/or ranks of the nearest neighbours of a test instance. In particular, we show that the theoretically optimal Samworth weights converge to a kernel. Kernel functions are closely related to fuzzy negation operators, and we propose a new kernel based on Yager negation. We also consider various distance and scaling measures, which we show can be related to each other. Through a systematic series of experiments on 85 real-life classification datasets, we find that NN, FNN and FRNN all perform best with Boscovich distance, and that NN and FRNN perform best with a combination of Samworth rank- and distance-weights and scaling by the mean absolute deviation around the median ($r_1$), the standard deviation ($r_2$) or the semi-interquartile range ($r_{\infty}^*$), while FNN performs best with only Samworth distance-weights and $r_1$- or $r_2$-scaling. However, NN achieves comparable performance with Yager-$\frac{1}{2}$ distance-weights, which are simpler to implement than a combination of Samworth distance- and rank-weights. Finally, FRNN generally outperforms NN, which in turn performs systematically better than FNN.