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Published work

25 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

FinDeepResearch: Evaluating Deep Research Agents in Rigorous Financial Analysis

Deep Research (DR) agents, powered by advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), have recently garnered increasing attention for their capability in conducting complex research tasks. However, existing literature lacks a rigorous and systematic evaluation of DR Agent's capabilities in critical research analysis. To address this gap, we first propose HisRubric, a novel evaluation framework with a hierarchical analytical structure and a fine-grained grading rubric for rigorously assessing DR agents' capabilities in corporate financial analysis. This framework mirrors the professional analyst's workflow, progressing from data recognition to metric calculation, and finally to strategic summarization and interpretation. Built on this framework, we construct a FinDeepResearch benchmark that comprises 64 listed companies from 8 financial markets across 4 languages, encompassing a total of 15,808 grading items. We further conduct extensive experiments on the FinDeepResearch using 16 representative methods, including 6 DR agents, 5 LLMs equipped with both deep reasoning and search capabilities, and 5 LLMs with deep reasoning capabilities only. The results reveal the strengths and limitations of these approaches across diverse capabilities, financial markets, and languages, offering valuable insights for future research and development. The benchmark and evaluation code is publicly available at https://OpenFinArena.com/.

preprint2026arXiv

Imaging-anchored Multiomics in Cardiovascular Disease: Integrating Cardiac Imaging, Bulk, Single-cell, and Spatial Transcriptomics

Cardiovascular disease arises from interactions between inherited risk, molecular programmes, and tissue-scale remodelling that are observed clinically through imaging. Health systems now routinely generate large volumes of cardiac MRI, CT and echocardiography together with bulk, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, yet these data are still analysed in separate pipelines. This review examines joint representations that link cardiac imaging phenotypes to transcriptomic and spatially resolved molecular states. An imaging-anchored perspective is adopted in which echocardiography, cardiac MRI and CT define a spatial phenotype of the heart, and bulk, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics provide cell-type- and location-specific molecular context. The biological and technical characteristics of these modalities are first summarised, and representation-learning strategies for each are outlined. Multimodal fusion approaches are reviewed, with emphasis on handling missing data, limited sample size, and batch effects. Finally, integrative pipelines for radiogenomics, spatial molecular alignment, and image-based prediction of gene expression are discussed, together with common failure modes, practical considerations, and open challenges. Spatial multiomics of human myocardium and atherosclerotic plaque, single-cell and spatial foundation models, and multimodal medical foundation models are collectively bringing imaging-anchored multiomics closer to large-scale cardiovascular translation.

preprint2026arXiv

Noise2Params: Unification and Parameter Determination from Noise via a Probabilistic Event Camera Model

Accurate, unified models for event cameras (ECs) remain elusive, hampering calibration and algorithm design. We develop a foundational probabilistic model for EC event detection, grounded in photon statistics, that unifies the description of static scene noise events and step response curves (S-curves) within a single analytical framework. Three formulations of the probability distributions are derived, spanning all intensity regimes: exact Poisson, saddle-point, and Gaussian. The model reveals the underlying connection between these otherwise disparate EC behaviors and clarifies the interpretation of S-curves, which we show is more nuanced than selecting a fixed probability threshold. Based on this model, we propose Noise2Params, a method for determining camera-specific values of the log-contrast threshold $B$, the lux-to-photon conversion factor $α$, and the leakage term $θ$ (found to be intensity dependent), via error minimization against observed noise-event distributions. Noise2Params requires only recordings of static, uniform scenes, offering an experimentally accessible alternative to approaches that demand specialized dynamic light sources. We further support the validity the model by training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on synthetic noise images generated from our distributions and evaluating their ability to reconstruct static scenes from experimental data. We further demonstrate the utility of our model by showing that CNNs incorporating synthetic data outperform those trained solely on experimental data. Our framework provides a quantitative foundation for EC calibration, noise-aware algorithm design, and applications in photon-limited regimes.

preprint2026arXiv

Unsupervised SE(3) Disentanglement for in situ Macromolecular Morphology Identification from Cryo-Electron Tomography

Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) provides direct 3D visualization of macromolecules inside the cell, enabling analysis of their in situ morphology. This morphology can be regarded as an SE(3)-invariant, denoised volumetric representation of subvolumes extracted from tomograms. Inferring morphology is therefore an inverse problem of estimating both a template morphology and its SE(3) transformation. Existing expectation-maximization based solution to this problem often misses rare but important morphologies and requires extensive manual hyperparameter tuning. Addressing this issue, we present a disentangled deep representation learning framework that separates SE(3) transformations from morphological content in the representation space. The framework includes a novel multi-choice learning module that enables this disentanglement for highly noisy cryo-ET data, and the learned morphological content is used to generate template morphologies. Experiments on simulated and real cryo-ET datasets demonstrate clear improvements over prior methods, including the discovery of previously unidentified macromolecular morphologies.

preprint2023arXiv

Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has recently gained popularity in the field of image segmentation due to its impressive capabilities in various segmentation tasks and its prompt-based interface. However, recent studies and individual experiments have shown that SAM underperforms in medical image segmentation, since the lack of the medical specific knowledge. This raises the question of how to enhance SAM's segmentation capability for medical images. In this paper, instead of fine-tuning the SAM model, we propose the Medical SAM Adapter (Med-SA), which incorporates domain-specific medical knowledge into the segmentation model using a light yet effective adaptation technique. In Med-SA, we propose Space-Depth Transpose (SD-Trans) to adapt 2D SAM to 3D medical images and Hyper-Prompting Adapter (HyP-Adpt) to achieve prompt-conditioned adaptation. We conduct comprehensive evaluation experiments on 17 medical image segmentation tasks across various image modalities. Med-SA outperforms several state-of-the-art (SOTA) medical image segmentation methods, while updating only 2\% of the parameters. Our code is released at https://github.com/KidsWithTokens/Medical-SAM-Adapter.

preprint2022arXiv

A generic framework for coded caching and distributed computation schemes

Several network communication problems are highly related such as coded caching and distributed computation. The centralized coded caching focuses on reducing the network burden in peak times in a wireless network system and the coded distributed computation studies the tradeoff between computation and communication in distributed system. In this paper, motivated by the study of the only rainbow $3$-term arithmetic progressions set, we propose a unified framework for constructing coded caching schemes. This framework builds bridges between coded caching schemes and lots of combinatorial objects due to the freedom of the choices of families and operations. We prove that any scheme based on a placement delivery array (PDA) can be represented by a rainbow scheme under this framework and lots of other known schemes can also be included in this framework. Moreover, we also present a new coded caching scheme with linear subpacketization and near constant rate using the only rainbow $3$-term arithmetic progressions set. Next, we modify the framework to be applicable to the distributed computing problem. We present a new transmission scheme in the shuffle phase and show that in certain cases it could have a lower communication load than the schemes based on PDAs or resolvable designs with the same number of files.

preprint2022arXiv

An Efficient Multitask Neural Network for Face Alignment, Head Pose Estimation and Face Tracking

While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have significantly boosted the performance of face related algorithms, maintaining accuracy and efficiency simultaneously in practical use remains challenging. The state-of-the-art methods employ deeper networks for better performance, which makes it less practical for mobile applications because of more parameters and higher computational complexity. Therefore, we propose an efficient multitask neural network, Alignment & Tracking & Pose Network (ATPN) for face alignment, face tracking and head pose estimation. Specifically, to achieve better performance with fewer layers for face alignment, we introduce a shortcut connection between shallow-layer and deep-layer features. We find the shallow-layer features are highly correspond to facial boundaries that can provide the structural information of face and it is crucial for face alignment. Moreover, we generate a cheap heatmap based on the face alignment result and fuse it with features to improve the performance of the other two tasks. Based on the heatmap, the network can utilize both geometric information of landmarks and appearance information for head pose estimation. The heatmap also provides attention clues for face tracking. The face tracking task also saves us the face detection procedure for each frame, which also significantly boost the real-time capability for video-based tasks. We experimentally validate ATPN on four benchmark datasets, WFLW, 300VW, WIDER Face and 300W-LP. The experimental results demonstrate that it achieves better performance with much less parameters and lower computational complexity compared to other light models.

preprint2022arXiv

BenchPress: A Deep Active Benchmark Generator

We develop BenchPress, the first ML benchmark generator for compilers that is steerable within feature space representations of source code. BenchPress synthesizes compiling functions by adding new code in any part of an empty or existing sequence by jointly observing its left and right context, achieving excellent compilation rate. BenchPress steers benchmark generation towards desired target features that has been impossible for state of the art synthesizers (or indeed humans) to reach. It performs better in targeting the features of Rodinia benchmarks in 3 different feature spaces compared with (a) CLgen - a state of the art ML synthesizer, (b) CLSmith fuzzer, (c) SRCIROR mutator or even (d) human-written code from GitHub. BenchPress is the first generator to search the feature space with active learning in order to generate benchmarks that will improve a downstream task. We show how using BenchPress, Grewe's et al. CPU vs GPU heuristic model can obtain a higher speedup when trained on BenchPress's benchmarks compared to other techniques. BenchPress is a powerful code generator: Its generated samples compile at a rate of 86%, compared to CLgen's 2.33%. Starting from an empty fixed input, BenchPress produces 10x more unique, compiling OpenCL benchmarks than CLgen, which are significantly larger and more feature diverse.

preprint2022arXiv

Boosting Active Learning via Improving Test Performance

Central to active learning (AL) is what data should be selected for annotation. Existing works attempt to select highly uncertain or informative data for annotation. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how selected data impacts the test performance of the task model used in AL. In this work, we explore such an impact by theoretically proving that selecting unlabeled data of higher gradient norm leads to a lower upper-bound of test loss, resulting in better test performance. However, due to the lack of label information, directly computing gradient norm for unlabeled data is infeasible. To address this challenge, we propose two schemes, namely expected-gradnorm and entropy-gradnorm. The former computes the gradient norm by constructing an expected empirical loss while the latter constructs an unsupervised loss with entropy. Furthermore, we integrate the two schemes in a universal AL framework. We evaluate our method on classical image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. To demonstrate its competency in domain applications and its robustness to noise, we also validate our method on a cellular imaging analysis task, namely cryo-Electron Tomography subtomogram classification. Results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance against the state of the art. Our source code is available at https://github.com/xulabs/aitom/blob/master/doc/projects/al_gradnorm.md.

preprint2022arXiv

Color Space-based HoVer-Net for Nuclei Instance Segmentation and Classification

Nuclei segmentation and classification is the first and most crucial step that is utilized for many different microscopy medical analysis applications. However, it suffers from many issues such as the segmentation of small objects, imbalance, and fine-grained differences between types of nuclei. In this paper, multiple different contributions were done tackling these problems present. Firstly, the recently released "ConvNeXt" was used as the encoder for HoVer-Net model since it leverages the key components of transformers that make them perform well. Secondly, to enhance the visual differences between nuclei, a multi-channel color space-based approach is used to aid the model in extracting distinguishing features. Thirdly, Unified Focal loss (UFL) was used to tackle the background-foreground imbalance. Finally, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) was used to ensure generalizability of the model. Overall, we were able to outperform the current state-of-the-art (SOTA), HoVer-Net, on the preliminary test set of the CoNiC Challenge 2022 by 12.489% mPQ+.

preprint2022arXiv

Estimating Instance-dependent Bayes-label Transition Matrix using a Deep Neural Network

In label-noise learning, estimating the transition matrix is a hot topic as the matrix plays an important role in building statistically consistent classifiers. Traditionally, the transition from clean labels to noisy labels (i.e., clean-label transition matrix (CLTM)) has been widely exploited to learn a clean label classifier by employing the noisy data. Motivated by that classifiers mostly output Bayes optimal labels for prediction, in this paper, we study to directly model the transition from Bayes optimal labels to noisy labels (i.e., Bayes-label transition matrix (BLTM)) and learn a classifier to predict Bayes optimal labels. Note that given only noisy data, it is ill-posed to estimate either the CLTM or the BLTM. But favorably, Bayes optimal labels have less uncertainty compared with the clean labels, i.e., the class posteriors of Bayes optimal labels are one-hot vectors while those of clean labels are not. This enables two advantages to estimate the BLTM, i.e., (a) a set of examples with theoretically guaranteed Bayes optimal labels can be collected out of noisy data; (b) the feasible solution space is much smaller. By exploiting the advantages, we estimate the BLTM parametrically by employing a deep neural network, leading to better generalization and superior classification performance.

preprint2022arXiv

Objects in Semantic Topology

A more realistic object detection paradigm, Open-World Object Detection, has arisen increasing research interests in the community recently. A qualified open-world object detector can not only identify objects of known categories, but also discover unknown objects, and incrementally learn to categorize them when their annotations progressively arrive. Previous works rely on independent modules to recognize unknown categories and perform incremental learning, respectively. In this paper, we provide a unified perspective: Semantic Topology. During the life-long learning of an open-world object detector, all object instances from the same category are assigned to their corresponding pre-defined node in the semantic topology, including the `unknown' category. This constraint builds up discriminative feature representations and consistent relationships among objects, thus enabling the detector to distinguish unknown objects out of the known categories, as well as making learned features of known objects undistorted when learning new categories incrementally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that semantic topology, either randomly-generated or derived from a well-trained language model, could outperform the current state-of-the-art open-world object detectors by a large margin, e.g., the absolute open-set error is reduced from 7832 to 2546, exhibiting the inherent superiority of semantic topology on open-world object detection.

preprint2022arXiv

SHREC 2021: Classification in cryo-electron tomograms

Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) is an imaging technique that allows three-dimensional visualization of macro-molecular assemblies under near-native conditions. Cryo-ET comes with a number of challenges, mainly low signal-to-noise and inability to obtain images from all angles. Computational methods are key to analyze cryo-electron tomograms. To promote innovation in computational methods, we generate a novel simulated dataset to benchmark different methods of localization and classification of biological macromolecules in tomograms. Our publicly available dataset contains ten tomographic reconstructions of simulated cell-like volumes. Each volume contains twelve different types of complexes, varying in size, function and structure. In this paper, we have evaluated seven different methods of finding and classifying proteins. Seven research groups present results obtained with learning-based methods and trained on the simulated dataset, as well as a baseline template matching (TM), a traditional method widely used in cryo-ET research. We show that learning-based approaches can achieve notably better localization and classification performance than TM. We also experimentally confirm that there is a negative relationship between particle size and performance for all methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Sparse Local Patch Transformer for Robust Face Alignment and Landmarks Inherent Relation Learning

Heatmap regression methods have dominated face alignment area in recent years while they ignore the inherent relation between different landmarks. In this paper, we propose a Sparse Local Patch Transformer (SLPT) for learning the inherent relation. The SLPT generates the representation of each single landmark from a local patch and aggregates them by an adaptive inherent relation based on the attention mechanism. The subpixel coordinate of each landmark is predicted independently based on the aggregated feature. Moreover, a coarse-to-fine framework is further introduced to incorporate with the SLPT, which enables the initial landmarks to gradually converge to the target facial landmarks using fine-grained features from dynamically resized local patches. Extensive experiments carried out on three popular benchmarks, including WFLW, 300W and COFW, demonstrate that the proposed method works at the state-of-the-art level with much less computational complexity by learning the inherent relation between facial landmarks. The code is available at the project website.

preprint2021arXiv

A Visual Analytics Approach to Facilitate the Proctoring of Online Exams

Online exams have become widely used to evaluate students' performance in mastering knowledge in recent years, especially during the pandemic of COVID-19. However, it is challenging to conduct proctoring for online exams due to the lack of face-to-face interaction. Also, prior research has shown that online exams are more vulnerable to various cheating behaviors, which can damage their credibility. This paper presents a novel visual analytics approach to facilitate the proctoring of online exams by analyzing the exam video records and mouse movement data of each student. Specifically, we detect and visualize suspected head and mouse movements of students in three levels of detail, which provides course instructors and teachers with convenient, efficient and reliable proctoring for online exams. Our extensive evaluations, including usage scenarios, a carefully-designed user study and expert interviews, demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our approach.

preprint2021arXiv

Characterizing the Landscape of COVID-19 Themed Cyberattacks and Defenses

COVID-19 (Coronavirus) hit the global society and economy with a big surprise. In particular, work-from-home has become a new norm for employees. Despite the fact that COVID-19 can equally attack innocent people and cybercriminals, it is ironic to see surges in cyberattacks leveraging COVID-19 as a theme, dubbed COVID-19 themed cyberattacks or COVID-19 attacks for short, which represent a new phenomenon that has yet to be systematically understood. In this paper, we make the first step towards fully characterizing the landscape of these attacks, including their sophistication via the Cyber Kill Chain model. We also explore the solution space of defenses against these attacks.

preprint2021arXiv

Data-Driven Characterization and Detection of COVID-19 Themed Malicious Websites

COVID-19 has hit hard on the global community, and organizations are working diligently to cope with the new norm of "work from home". However, the volume of remote work is unprecedented and creates opportunities for cyber attackers to penetrate home computers. Attackers have been leveraging websites with COVID-19 related names, dubbed COVID-19 themed malicious websites. These websites mostly contain false information, fake forms, fraudulent payments, scams, or malicious payloads to steal sensitive information or infect victims' computers. In this paper, we present a data-driven study on characterizing and detecting COVID-19 themed malicious websites. Our characterization study shows that attackers are agile and are deceptively crafty in designing geolocation targeted websites, often leveraging popular domain registrars and top-level domains. Our detection study shows that the Random Forest classifier can detect COVID-19 themed malicious websites based on the lexical and WHOIS features defined in this paper, achieving a 98% accuracy and 2.7% false-positive rate.

preprint2021arXiv

Inference on the History of a Randomly Growing Tree

The spread of infectious disease in a human community or the proliferation of fake news on social media can be modeled as a randomly growing tree-shaped graph. The history of the random growth process is often unobserved but contains important information such as the source of the infection. We consider the problem of statistical inference on aspects of the latent history using only a single snapshot of the final tree. Our approach is to apply random labels to the observed unlabeled tree and analyze the resulting distribution of the growth process, conditional on the final outcome. We show that this conditional distribution is tractable under a shape-exchangeability condition, which we introduce here, and that this condition is satisfied for many popular models for randomly growing trees such as uniform attachment, linear preferential attachment and uniform attachment on a $D$-regular tree. For inference of the root under shape-exchangeability, we propose O(n log n) time algorithms for constructing confidence sets with valid frequentist coverage as well as bounds on the expected size of the confidence sets. We also provide efficient sampling algorithms that extend our methods to a wide class of inference problems.

preprint2021arXiv

Self-supervised Pretraining of Visual Features in the Wild

Recently, self-supervised learning methods like MoCo, SimCLR, BYOL and SwAV have reduced the gap with supervised methods. These results have been achieved in a control environment, that is the highly curated ImageNet dataset. However, the premise of self-supervised learning is that it can learn from any random image and from any unbounded dataset. In this work, we explore if self-supervision lives to its expectation by training large models on random, uncurated images with no supervision. Our final SElf-supERvised (SEER) model, a RegNetY with 1.3B parameters trained on 1B random images with 512 GPUs achieves 84.2% top-1 accuracy, surpassing the best self-supervised pretrained model by 1% and confirming that self-supervised learning works in a real world setting. Interestingly, we also observe that self-supervised models are good few-shot learners achieving 77.9% top-1 with access to only 10% of ImageNet. Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/vissl

preprint2021arXiv

Single-View 3D Object Reconstruction from Shape Priors in Memory

Existing methods for single-view 3D object reconstruction directly learn to transform image features into 3D representations. However, these methods are vulnerable to images containing noisy backgrounds and heavy occlusions because the extracted image features do not contain enough information to reconstruct high-quality 3D shapes. Humans routinely use incomplete or noisy visual cues from an image to retrieve similar 3D shapes from their memory and reconstruct the 3D shape of an object. Inspired by this, we propose a novel method, named Mem3D, that explicitly constructs shape priors to supplement the missing information in the image. Specifically, the shape priors are in the forms of "image-voxel" pairs in the memory network, which is stored by a well-designed writing strategy during training. We also propose a voxel triplet loss function that helps to retrieve the precise 3D shapes that are highly related to the input image from shape priors. The LSTM-based shape encoder is introduced to extract information from the retrieved 3D shapes, which are useful in recovering the 3D shape of an object that is heavily occluded or in complex environments. Experimental results demonstrate that Mem3D significantly improves reconstruction quality and performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on the ShapeNet and Pix3D datasets.

preprint2021arXiv

SSFG: Stochastically Scaling Features and Gradients for Regularizing Graph Convolutional Networks

Graph convolutional networks have been successfully applied in various graph-based tasks. In a typical graph convolutional layer, node features are updated by aggregating neighborhood information. Repeatedly applying graph convolutions can cause the oversmoothing issue, i.e., node features at deep layers converge to similar values. Previous studies have suggested that oversmoothing is one of the major issues that restrict the performance of graph convolutional networks. In this paper, we propose a stochastic regularization method to tackle the oversmoothing problem. In the proposed method, we stochastically scale features and gradients (SSFG) by a factor sampled from a probability distribution in the training procedure. By explicitly applying a scaling factor to break feature convergence, the oversmoothing issue is alleviated. We show that applying stochastic scaling at the gradient level is complementary to that applied at the feature level to improve the overall performance. Our method does not increase the number of trainable parameters. When used together with ReLU, our SSFG can be seen as a stochastic ReLU activation function. We experimentally validate our SSFG regularization method on three commonly used types of graph networks. Extensive experimental results on seven benchmark datasets for four graph-based tasks demonstrate that our SSFG regularization is effective in improving the overall performance of the baseline graph networks.

preprint2020arXiv

Experimental Analysis of Legendre Decomposition in Machine Learning

In this technical report, we analyze Legendre decomposition for non-negative tensor in theory and application. In theory, the properties of dual parameters and dually flat manifold in Legendre decomposition are reviewed, and the process of tensor projection and parameter updating is analyzed. In application, a series of verification experiments and clustering experiments with parameters on submanifold were carried out, hoping to find an effective lower dimensional representation of the input tensor. The experimental results show that the parameters on submanifold have no ability to be directly used as low-rank representations. Combined with analysis, we connect Legendre decomposition with neural networks and low-rank representation applications, and put forward some promising prospects.

preprint2020arXiv

Few shot domain adaptation for in situ macromolecule structural classification in cryo-electron tomograms

Motivation: Cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) visualizes structure and spatial organization of macromolecules and their interactions with other subcellular components inside single cells in the close-to-native state at sub-molecular resolution. Such information is critical for the accurate understanding of cellular processes. However, subtomogram classification remains one of the major challenges for the systematic recognition and recovery of the macromolecule structures in cryo-ET because of imaging limits and data quantity. Recently, deep learning has significantly improved the throughput and accuracy of large-scale subtomogram classification. However often it is difficult to get enough high-quality annotated subtomogram data for supervised training due to the enormous expense of labeling. To tackle this problem, it is beneficial to utilize another already annotated dataset to assist the training process. However, due to the discrepancy of image intensity distribution between source domain and target domain, the model trained on subtomograms in source domainmay perform poorly in predicting subtomogram classes in the target domain. Results: In this paper, we adapt a few shot domain adaptation method for deep learning based cross-domain subtomogram classification. The essential idea of our method consists of two parts: 1) take full advantage of the distribution of plentiful unlabeled target domain data, and 2) exploit the correlation between the whole source domain dataset and few labeled target domain data. Experiments conducted on simulated and real datasets show that our method achieves significant improvement on cross domain subtomogram classification compared with baseline methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Improving Lesion Segmentation for Diabetic Retinopathy using Adversarial Learning

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of blindness in working age adults. DR lesions can be challenging to identify in fundus images, and automatic DR detection systems can offer strong clinical value. Of the publicly available labeled datasets for DR, the Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD) presents retinal fundus images with pixel-level annotations of four distinct lesions: microaneurysms, hemorrhages, soft exudates and hard exudates. We utilize the HEDNet edge detector to solve a semantic segmentation task on this dataset, and then propose an end-to-end system for pixel-level segmentation of DR lesions by incorporating HEDNet into a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN). We design a loss function that adds adversarial loss to segmentation loss. Our experiments show that the addition of the adversarial loss improves the lesion segmentation performance over the baseline.

preprint2020arXiv

Improving Utility and Security of the Shuffler-based Differential Privacy

When collecting information, local differential privacy (LDP) alleviates privacy concerns of users because their private information is randomized before being sent it to the central aggregator. LDP imposes large amount of noise as each user executes the randomization independently. To address this issue, recent work introduced an intermediate server with the assumption that this intermediate server does not collude with the aggregator. Under this assumption, less noise can be added to achieve the same privacy guarantee as LDP, thus improving utility for the data collection task. This paper investigates this multiple-party setting of LDP. We analyze the system model and identify potential adversaries. We then make two improvements: a new algorithm that achieves a better privacy-utility tradeoff; and a novel protocol that provides better protection against various attacks. Finally, we perform experiments to compare different methods and demonstrate the benefits of using our proposed method.