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Deyu Meng

Deyu Meng contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

24 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Distributional View for Visual Mechanistic Interpretability: KL-Minimal Soft-Constraint Principle

Most current paradigms in visual mechanistic interpretability (MI) remain confined to interpreting internal units of the vision model via heuristic methods (e.g., top-$K$ activation retrieval or optimization with regularization). In this work, we establish a theoretical distributional view for visual MI, which models the influence of a feature activation on the natural image distribution, thereby formulating a Kullback-Leibler (KL)-minimal optimization problem to model the MI task. Under this framework, statistical biases are identified within previous MI paradigms, which reveal that they may either be perceptually uninterpretable to humans (i.e., deviate from the natural image distribution), or mechanistically unfaithful to the vision models (i.e., unable to activate model features). To resolve the biases under the distributional view, we propose a model with a KL-minimal soft-constraint principle for visual MI that theoretically balances interpretability and faithfulness. We realize this principle via energy-guided diffusion posterior sampling. Extensive experiments validate the theoretical soundness of the proposed distributional view and demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our paradigm on the DINOv3 vision model.

preprint2026arXiv

Aligning Network Equivariance with Data Symmetry: A Theoretical Framework and Adaptive Approach for Image Restoration

Image restoration is an inherently ill posed inverse problem. Equivariant networks that embed geometric symmetry priors can mitigate this ill posedness and improve performance. However, current understanding of the relationship between network equivariance and data symmetry remains largely heuristic. Particularly for real world data with imperfect symmetry, existing research lacks a systematic theoretical framework to quantify symmetry, select transformation groups, or evaluate model data alignment. To bridge this gap, we conduct an analysis from an optimization perspective and formalize the intrinsic relationship among data symmetry priors, model equivariance, and generalization capability. Specifically, we propose for the first time a quantifiable definition of non strict symmetry at the dataset level (rather than sample level) and use it as a constraint to formulate the restoration inverse problem. We then show that the equivariance for restoration models can be naturally derived from this inverse problems incorporated the proposed symmetry constraints, and that the equivariance error of the optimal restoration operator is strictly bounded by the data symmetry error and the discretization mesh size. Furthermore, by analyzing the network's empirical risk, we demonstrate that aligning equivariance with data symmetry optimizes the bias variance trade off, minimizing the total expected risk. Guided by these insights, we propose a Sample Adaptive Equivariant Network that uses a hypernetwork and transformation learnable equivariant convolutions to dynamically align with each sample's inherent symmetry. Extensive experiments on super resolution, denoising, and deraining validate our theoretical findings and show significant superiority over standard baselines and traditional equivariant models. Our code and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/tanfy929/SA-Conv.

preprint2026arXiv

Deciphering Neural Reparameterized Full-Waveform Inversion with Neural Sensitivity Kernel and Wave Tangent Kernel

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) estimates unknown parameters in the wave equation from limited boundary measurements. Recent advances in neural reparameterized FWI (NeurFWI) demonstrate that representing the parameters using a neural network can reduce the reliance on the high-quality initial model and wavefield data, at the cost of slow high-resolution convergence. However, its underlying theoretical mechanism remains unclear. In this study, we establish the neural sensitivity kernel (NSK) and the wave tangent kernel (WTK) to analyze their convergence behavior from both model and data domains. These theoretical frameworks show that the neural tangent kernel (NTK) induced by neural representation adaptively modulates the original sensitivity and wave tangent kernels. This modulation leads to several key outcomes, i.e., the spectral filtering effect, the gradient wavenumber modulation, and the wave frequency bias, connecting the convergence behavior of NeurFWI with the eigen-structures of NSK and WTK. Building on these insights, we propose several enhanced NeurFWI methods with tailored eigen-structures in NSK and WTK to improve inversion performances and efficiency. We numerically validate these theoretical claims and the proposed methods in seismic exploration, and firstly extend their application to medical imaging.

preprint2026arXiv

HIR-ALIGN: Enhancing Hyperspectral Image Restoration via Diffusion-Based Data Generation

Hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration is crucial for reliable analysis, as real HSIs suffer from degradations like noise, blur, and resolution loss. However, existing models trained on source data often fail on target domains lacking clean references, a common occurrence in practice. To address this issue, we present HIR-ALIGN, a plug-and-play target-adaptive augmentation framework that enhances hyperspectral image restoration by augmenting limited training images with synthetic data that closely matches the target distribution using no extra data. It consists of three stages: (i) proxy generation, where off-the-shelf restoration models restore degraded target observations to produce semantics-preserving proxy HSIs that approximate target-domain clean images; (ii) distribution-adaptive synthesis, where a blur-robust unCLIP diffusion model generates target-aligned RGBs from proxy RGBs, with prompt conditioning and embedding-space noise initialization. Then, a warp-based spectral transfer module synthesizes HSIs by aligning each generated RGB with the proxy RGB, estimating soft patch-wise transport weights, and applying these weights and learnable local interpolation kernels to the proxy HSI; and (iii) aligned supervised finetuning, where restoration networks pretrained on the source distribution are finetuned using both the proxy HSIs and synthesized target-aligned HSIs, and are then deployed on degraded target images. We further provide theoretical analysis showing that augmentation-based finetuning can achieve lower target-domain restoration risk by jointly improving target distribution coverage and controlling spectral bias. Extensive experiments on simulated and real datasets across denoising and super-resolution tasks demonstrate that HIR-ALIGN consistently improves source-only supervised baselines, outperforming both source-only counterparts and representative unsupervised methods.

preprint2025arXiv

HIDFlowNet: A Flow-Based Deep Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising is essentially ill-posed since a noisy HSI can be degraded from multiple clean HSIs. However, existing deep learning (DL)-based approaches only restore one clean HSI from the given noisy HSI with a deterministic mapping, thus ignoring the ill-posed issue and always resulting in an over-smoothing problem. Additionally, these DL-based methods often neglect that noise is part of the high-frequency component and their network architectures fail to decouple the learning of low-frequency and high-frequency. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes a flow-based HSI denoising network (HIDFlowNet) to directly learn the conditional distribution of the clean HSI given the noisy HSI and thus diverse clean HSIs can be sampled from the conditional distribution. Overall, our HIDFlowNet is induced from the generative flow model and is comprised of an invertible decoder and a conditional encoder, which can explicitly decouple the learning of low-frequency and high-frequency information of HSI. Specifically, the invertible decoder is built by staking a succession of invertible conditional blocks (ICBs) to capture the local high-frequency details. The conditional encoder utilizes down-sampling operations to obtain low-resolution images and uses transformers to capture correlations over a long distance so that global low-frequency information can be effectively extracted. Extensive experiments on simulated and real HSI datasets verify that our proposed HIDFlowNet can obtain better or comparable results compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2024arXiv

Gramformer: Learning Crowd Counting via Graph-Modulated Transformer

Transformer has been popular in recent crowd counting work since it breaks the limited receptive field of traditional CNNs. However, since crowd images always contain a large number of similar patches, the self-attention mechanism in Transformer tends to find a homogenized solution where the attention maps of almost all patches are identical. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing Gramformer: a graph-modulated transformer to enhance the network by adjusting the attention and input node features respectively on the basis of two different types of graphs. Firstly, an attention graph is proposed to diverse attention maps to attend to complementary information. The graph is building upon the dissimilarities between patches, modulating the attention in an anti-similarity fashion. Secondly, a feature-based centrality encoding is proposed to discover the centrality positions or importance of nodes. We encode them with a proposed centrality indices scheme to modulate the node features and similarity relationships. Extensive experiments on four challenging crowd counting datasets have validated the competitiveness of the proposed method. Code is available at {https://github.com/LoraLinH/Gramformer}.

preprint2024arXiv

Revisiting Nonlocal Self-Similarity from Continuous Representation

Nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) is an important prior that has been successfully applied in multi-dimensional data processing tasks, e.g., image and video recovery. However, existing NSS-based methods are solely suitable for meshgrid data such as images and videos, but are not suitable for emerging off-meshgrid data, e.g., point cloud and climate data. In this work, we revisit the NSS from the continuous representation perspective and propose a novel Continuous Representation-based NonLocal method (termed as CRNL), which has two innovative features as compared with classical nonlocal methods. First, based on the continuous representation, our CRNL unifies the measure of self-similarity for on-meshgrid and off-meshgrid data and thus is naturally suitable for both of them. Second, the nonlocal continuous groups can be more compactly and efficiently represented by the coupled low-rank function factorization, which simultaneously exploits the similarity within each group and across different groups, while classical nonlocal methods neglect the similarity across groups. This elaborately designed coupled mechanism allows our method to enjoy favorable performance over conventional NSS methods in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. Extensive multi-dimensional data processing experiments on-meshgrid (e.g., image inpainting and image denoising) and off-meshgrid (e.g., climate data prediction and point cloud recovery) validate the versatility, effectiveness, and efficiency of our CRNL as compared with state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2022arXiv

An Efficient and Accurate Rough Set for Feature Selection, Classification and Knowledge Representation

This paper present a strong data mining method based on rough set, which can realize feature selection, classification and knowledge representation at the same time. Rough set has good interpretability, and is a popular method for feature selections. But low efficiency and low accuracy are its main drawbacks that limits its application ability. In this paper,corresponding to the accuracy, we first find the ineffectiveness of rough set because of overfitting, especially in processing noise attribute, and propose a robust measurement for an attribute, called relative importance.we proposed the concept of "rough concept tree" for knowledge representation and classification. Experimental results on public benchmark data sets show that the proposed framework achieves higher accurcy than seven popular or the state-of-the-art feature selection methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Blind Image Super-resolution with Elaborate Degradation Modeling on Noise and Kernel

While researches on model-based blind single image super-resolution (SISR) have achieved tremendous successes recently, most of them do not consider the image degradation sufficiently. Firstly, they always assume image noise obeys an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian or Laplacian distribution, which largely underestimates the complexity of real noise. Secondly, previous commonly-used kernel priors (e.g., normalization, sparsity) are not effective enough to guarantee a rational kernel solution, and thus degenerates the performance of subsequent SISR task. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a model-based blind SISR method under the probabilistic framework, which elaborately models image degradation from the perspectives of noise and blur kernel. Specifically, instead of the traditional i.i.d. noise assumption, a patch-based non-i.i.d. noise model is proposed to tackle the complicated real noise, expecting to increase the degrees of freedom of the model for noise representation. As for the blur kernel, we novelly construct a concise yet effective kernel generator, and plug it into the proposed blind SISR method as an explicit kernel prior (EKP). To solve the proposed model, a theoretically grounded Monte Carlo EM algorithm is specifically designed. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over current state-of-the-arts on synthetic and real datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/zsyOAOA/BSRDM.

preprint2022arXiv

Decoupled-and-Coupled Networks: Self-Supervised Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution with Subpixel Fusion

Enormous efforts have been recently made to super-resolve hyperspectral (HS) images with the aid of high spatial resolution multispectral (MS) images. Most prior works usually perform the fusion task by means of multifarious pixel-level priors. Yet the intrinsic effects of a large distribution gap between HS-MS data due to differences in the spatial and spectral resolution are less investigated. The gap might be caused by unknown sensor-specific properties or highly-mixed spectral information within one pixel (due to low spatial resolution). To this end, we propose a subpixel-level HS super-resolution framework by devising a novel decoupled-and-coupled network, called DC-Net, to progressively fuse HS-MS information from the pixel- to subpixel-level, from the image- to feature-level. As the name suggests, DC-Net first decouples the input into common (or cross-sensor) and sensor-specific components to eliminate the gap between HS-MS images before further fusion, and then fully blends them by a model-guided coupled spectral unmixing (CSU) net. More significantly, we append a self-supervised learning module behind the CSU net by guaranteeing the material consistency to enhance the detailed appearances of the restored HS product. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of our method both visually and quantitatively and achieve a significant improvement in comparison with the state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, the codes and datasets will be available at https://sites.google.com/view/danfeng-hong for the sake of reproducibility.

preprint2022arXiv

Diagnosing Batch Normalization in Class Incremental Learning

Extensive researches have applied deep neural networks (DNNs) in class incremental learning (Class-IL). As building blocks of DNNs, batch normalization (BN) standardizes intermediate feature maps and has been widely validated to improve training stability and convergence. However, we claim that the direct use of standard BN in Class-IL models is harmful to both the representation learning and the classifier training, thus exacerbating catastrophic forgetting. In this paper we investigate the influence of BN on Class-IL models by illustrating such BN dilemma. We further propose BN Tricks to address the issue by training a better feature extractor while eliminating classification bias. Without inviting extra hyperparameters, we apply BN Tricks to three baseline rehearsal-based methods, ER, DER++ and iCaRL. Through comprehensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets of Seq-CIFAR-10, Seq-CIFAR-100 and Seq-Tiny-ImageNet, we show that BN Tricks can bring significant performance gains to all adopted baselines, revealing its potential generality along this line of research.

preprint2022arXiv

Low-light Image Enhancement by Retinex Based Algorithm Unrolling and Adjustment

Motivated by their recent advances, deep learning techniques have been widely applied to low-light image enhancement (LIE) problem. Among which, Retinex theory based ones, mostly following a decomposition-adjustment pipeline, have taken an important place due to its physical interpretation and promising performance. However, current investigations on Retinex based deep learning are still not sufficient, ignoring many useful experiences from traditional methods. Besides, the adjustment step is either performed with simple image processing techniques, or by complicated networks, both of which are unsatisfactory in practice. To address these issues, we propose a new deep learning framework for the LIE problem. The proposed framework contains a decomposition network inspired by algorithm unrolling, and adjustment networks considering both global brightness and local brightness sensitivity. By virtue of algorithm unrolling, both implicit priors learned from data and explicit priors borrowed from traditional methods can be embedded in the network, facilitate to better decomposition. Meanwhile, the consideration of global and local brightness can guide designing simple yet effective network modules for adjustment. Besides, to avoid manually parameter tuning, we also propose a self-supervised fine-tuning strategy, which can always guarantee a promising performance. Experiments on a series of typical LIE datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method, both quantitatively and visually, as compared with existing methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Two-Stream Graph Convolutional Network for Intra-oral Scanner Image Segmentation

Precise segmentation of teeth from intra-oral scanner images is an essential task in computer-aided orthodontic surgical planning. The state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods often simply concatenate the raw geometric attributes (i.e., coordinates and normal vectors) of mesh cells to train a single-stream network for automatic intra-oral scanner image segmentation. However, since different raw attributes reveal completely different geometric information, the naive concatenation of different raw attributes at the (low-level) input stage may bring unnecessary confusion in describing and differentiating between mesh cells, thus hampering the learning of high-level geometric representations for the segmentation task. To address this issue, we design a two-stream graph convolutional network (i.e., TSGCN), which can effectively handle inter-view confusion between different raw attributes to more effectively fuse their complementary information and learn discriminative multi-view geometric representations. Specifically, our TSGCN adopts two input-specific graph-learning streams to extract complementary high-level geometric representations from coordinates and normal vectors, respectively. Then, these single-view representations are further fused by a self-attention module to adaptively balance the contributions of different views in learning more discriminative multi-view representations for accurate and fully automatic tooth segmentation. We have evaluated our TSGCN on a real-patient dataset of dental (mesh) models acquired by 3D intraoral scanners. Experimental results show that our TSGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 3D tooth (surface) segmentation. Github: https://github.com/ZhangLingMing1/TSGCNet.

preprint2022arXiv

Unsupervised Local Discrimination for Medical Images

Contrastive learning, which aims to capture general representation from unlabeled images to initialize the medical analysis models, has been proven effective in alleviating the high demand for expensive annotations. Current methods mainly focus on instance-wise comparisons to learn the global discriminative features, however, pretermitting the local details to distinguish tiny anatomical structures, lesions, and tissues. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a general unsupervised representation learning framework, named local discrimination (LD), to learn local discriminative features for medical images by closely embedding semantically similar pixels and identifying regions of similar structures across different images. Specifically, this model is equipped with an embedding module for pixel-wise embedding and a clustering module for generating segmentation. And these two modules are unified through optimizing our novel region discrimination loss function in a mutually beneficial mechanism, which enables our model to reflect structure information as well as measure pixel-wise and region-wise similarity. Furthermore, based on LD, we propose a center-sensitive one-shot landmark localization algorithm and a shape-guided cross-modality segmentation model to foster the generalizability of our model. When transferred to downstream tasks, the learned representation by our method shows a better generalization, outperforming representation from 18 state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and winning 9 out of all 12 downstream tasks. Especially for the challenging lesion segmentation tasks, the proposed method achieves significantly better performances. The source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/HuaiChen-1994/LDLearning.

preprint2020arXiv

A Model-driven Deep Neural Network for Single Image Rain Removal

Deep learning (DL) methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in the task of single image rain removal. Most of current DL architectures, however, are still lack of sufficient interpretability and not fully integrated with physical structures inside general rain streaks. To this issue, in this paper, we propose a model-driven deep neural network for the task, with fully interpretable network structures. Specifically, based on the convolutional dictionary learning mechanism for representing rain, we propose a novel single image deraining model and utilize the proximal gradient descent technique to design an iterative algorithm only containing simple operators for solving the model. Such a simple implementation scheme facilitates us to unfold it into a new deep network architecture, called rain convolutional dictionary network (RCDNet), with almost every network module one-to-one corresponding to each operation involved in the algorithm. By end-to-end training the proposed RCDNet, all the rain kernels and proximal operators can be automatically extracted, faithfully characterizing the features of both rain and clean background layers, and thus naturally lead to its better deraining performance, especially in real scenarios. Comprehensive experiments substantiate the superiority of the proposed network, especially its well generality to diverse testing scenarios and good interpretability for all its modules, as compared with state-of-the-arts both visually and quantitatively. The source codes are available at \url{https://github.com/hongwang01/RCDNet}.

preprint2020arXiv

Ball k-means

This paper presents a novel accelerated exact k-means algorithm called the Ball k-means algorithm, which uses a ball to describe a cluster, focusing on reducing the point-centroid distance computation. The Ball k-means can accurately find the neighbor clusters for each cluster resulting distance computations only between a point and its neighbor clusters' centroids instead of all centroids. Moreover, each cluster can be divided into a stable area and an active area, and the later one can be further divided into annulus areas. The assigned cluster of the points in the stable area is not changed in the current iteration while the points in the annulus area will be adjusted within a few neighbor clusters in the current iteration. Also, there are no upper or lower bounds in the proposed Ball k-means. Furthermore, reducing centroid-centroid distance computation between iterations makes it efficient for large k clustering. The fast speed, no extra parameters and simple design of the Ball k-means make it an all-around replacement of the naive k-means algorithm.

preprint2020arXiv

Cross-Attention in Coupled Unmixing Nets for Unsupervised Hyperspectral Super-Resolution

The recent advancement of deep learning techniques has made great progress on hyperspectral image super-resolution (HSI-SR). Yet the development of unsupervised deep networks remains challenging for this task. To this end, we propose a novel coupled unmixing network with a cross-attention mechanism, CUCaNet for short, to enhance the spatial resolution of HSI by means of higher-spatial-resolution multispectral image (MSI). Inspired by coupled spectral unmixing, a two-stream convolutional autoencoder framework is taken as backbone to jointly decompose MS and HS data into a spectrally meaningful basis and corresponding coefficients. CUCaNet is capable of adaptively learning spectral and spatial response functions from HS-MS correspondences by enforcing reasonable consistency assumptions on the networks. Moreover, a cross-attention module is devised to yield more effective spatial-spectral information transfer in networks. Extensive experiments are conducted on three widely-used HS-MS datasets in comparison with state-of-the-art HSI-SR models, demonstrating the superiority of the CUCaNet in the HSI-SR application. Furthermore, the codes and datasets will be available at: https://github.com/danfenghong/ECCV2020_CUCaNet.

preprint2020arXiv

Dual Adversarial Network: Toward Real-world Noise Removal and Noise Generation

Real-world image noise removal is a long-standing yet very challenging task in computer vision. The success of deep neural network in denoising stimulates the research of noise generation, aiming at synthesizing more clean-noisy image pairs to facilitate the training of deep denoisers. In this work, we propose a novel unified framework to simultaneously deal with the noise removal and noise generation tasks. Instead of only inferring the posteriori distribution of the latent clean image conditioned on the observed noisy image in traditional MAP framework, our proposed method learns the joint distribution of the clean-noisy image pairs. Specifically, we approximate the joint distribution with two different factorized forms, which can be formulated as a denoiser mapping the noisy image to the clean one and a generator mapping the clean image to the noisy one. The learned joint distribution implicitly contains all the information between the noisy and clean images, avoiding the necessity of manually designing the image priors and noise assumptions as traditional. Besides, the performance of our denoiser can be further improved by augmenting the original training dataset with the learned generator. Moreover, we propose two metrics to assess the quality of the generated noisy image, for which, to the best of our knowledge, such metrics are firstly proposed along this research line. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-arts both in the real noise removal and generation tasks. The training and testing code is available at https://github.com/zsyOAOA/DANet.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning Adaptive Loss for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels

Robust loss minimization is an important strategy for handling robust learning issue on noisy labels. Current robust loss functions, however, inevitably involve hyperparameter(s) to be tuned, manually or heuristically through cross validation, which makes them fairly hard to be generally applied in practice. Besides, the non-convexity brought by the loss as well as the complicated network architecture makes it easily trapped into an unexpected solution with poor generalization capability. To address above issues, we propose a meta-learning method capable of adaptively learning hyperparameter in robust loss functions. Specifically, through mutual amelioration between robust loss hyperparameter and network parameters in our method, both of them can be simultaneously finely learned and coordinated to attain solutions with good generalization capability. Four kinds of SOTA robust loss functions are attempted to be integrated into our algorithm, and comprehensive experiments substantiate the general availability and effectiveness of the proposed method in both its accuracy and generalization performance, as compared with conventional hyperparameter tuning strategy, even with carefully tuned hyperparameters.

preprint2020arXiv

LT-Net: Label Transfer by Learning Reversible Voxel-wise Correspondence for One-shot Medical Image Segmentation

We introduce a one-shot segmentation method to alleviate the burden of manual annotation for medical images. The main idea is to treat one-shot segmentation as a classical atlas-based segmentation problem, where voxel-wise correspondence from the atlas to the unlabelled data is learned. Subsequently, segmentation label of the atlas can be transferred to the unlabelled data with the learned correspondence. However, since ground truth correspondence between images is usually unavailable, the learning system must be well-supervised to avoid mode collapse and convergence failure. To overcome this difficulty, we resort to the forward-backward consistency, which is widely used in correspondence problems, and additionally learn the backward correspondences from the warped atlases back to the original atlas. This cycle-correspondence learning design enables a variety of extra, cycle-consistency-based supervision signals to make the training process stable, while also boost the performance. We demonstrate the superiority of our method over both deep learning-based one-shot segmentation methods and a classical multi-atlas segmentation method via thorough experiments.

preprint2020arXiv

Meta Feature Modulator for Long-tailed Recognition

Deep neural networks often degrade significantly when training data suffer from class imbalance problems. Existing approaches, e.g., re-sampling and re-weighting, commonly address this issue by rearranging the label distribution of training data to train the networks fitting well to the implicit balanced label distribution. However, most of them hinder the representative ability of learned features due to insufficient use of intra/inter-sample information of training data. To address this issue, we propose meta feature modulator (MFM), a meta-learning framework to model the difference between the long-tailed training data and the balanced meta data from the perspective of representation learning. Concretely, we employ learnable hyper-parameters (dubbed modulation parameters) to adaptively scale and shift the intermediate features of classification networks, and the modulation parameters are optimized together with the classification network parameters guided by a small amount of balanced meta data. We further design a modulator network to guide the generation of the modulation parameters, and such a meta-learner can be readily adapted to train the classification network on other long-tailed datasets. Extensive experiments on benchmark vision datasets substantiate the superiority of our approach on long-tailed recognition tasks beyond other state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Meta Transition Adaptation for Robust Deep Learning with Noisy Labels

To discover intrinsic inter-class transition probabilities underlying data, learning with noise transition has become an important approach for robust deep learning on corrupted labels. Prior methods attempt to achieve such transition knowledge by pre-assuming strongly confident anchor points with 1-probability belonging to a specific class, generally infeasible in practice, or directly jointly estimating the transition matrix and learning the classifier from the noisy samples, always leading to inaccurate estimation misguided by wrong annotation information especially in large noise cases. To alleviate these issues, this study proposes a new meta-transition-learning strategy for the task. Specifically, through the sound guidance of a small set of meta data with clean labels, the noise transition matrix and the classifier parameters can be mutually ameliorated to avoid being trapped by noisy training samples, and without need of any anchor point assumptions. Besides, we prove our method is with statistical consistency guarantee on correctly estimating the desired transition matrix. Extensive synthetic and real experiments validate that our method can more accurately extract the transition matrix, naturally following its more robust performance than prior arts. Its essential relationship with label distribution learning is also discussed, which explains its fine performance even under no-noise scenarios.

preprint2020arXiv

Select-ProtoNet: Learning to Select for Few-Shot Disease Subtype Prediction

Current machine learning has made great progress on computer vision and many other fields attributed to the large amount of high-quality training samples, while it does not work very well on genomic data analysis, since they are notoriously known as small data. In our work, we focus on few-shot disease subtype prediction problem, identifying subgroups of similar patients that can guide treatment decisions for a specific individual through training on small data. In fact, doctors and clinicians always address this problem by studying several interrelated clinical variables simultaneously. We attempt to simulate such clinical perspective, and introduce meta learning techniques to develop a new model, which can extract the common experience or knowledge from interrelated clinical tasks and transfer it to help address new tasks. Our new model is built upon a carefully designed meta-learner, called Prototypical Network, that is a simple yet effective meta learning machine for few-shot image classification. Observing that gene expression data have specifically high dimensionality and high noise properties compared with image data, we proposed a new extension of it by appending two modules to address these issues. Concretely, we append a feature selection layer to automatically filter out the disease-irrelated genes and incorporate a sample reweighting strategy to adaptively remove noisy data, and meanwhile the extended model is capable of learning from a limited number of training examples and generalize well. Simulations and real gene expression data experiments substantiate the superiority of the proposed method for predicting the subtypes of disease and identifying potential disease-related genes.

preprint2020arXiv

Structural Residual Learning for Single Image Rain Removal

To alleviate the adverse effect of rain streaks in image processing tasks, CNN-based single image rain removal methods have been recently proposed. However, the performance of these deep learning methods largely relies on the covering range of rain shapes contained in the pre-collected training rainy-clean image pairs. This makes them easily trapped into the overfitting-to-the-training-samples issue and cannot finely generalize to practical rainy images with complex and diverse rain streaks. Against this generalization issue, this study proposes a new network architecture by enforcing the output residual of the network possess intrinsic rain structures. Such a structural residual setting guarantees the rain layer extracted by the network finely comply with the prior knowledge of general rain streaks, and thus regulates sound rain shapes capable of being well extracted from rainy images in both training and predicting stages. Such a general regularization function naturally leads to both its better training accuracy and testing generalization capability even for those non-seen rain configurations. Such superiority is comprehensively substantiated by experiments implemented on synthetic and real datasets both visually and quantitatively as compared with current state-of-the-art methods.