Volume 19, Number 3, 2022

Display Method:
Review
Paradigm Shift in Natural Language Processing
Tian-Xiang Sun , Xiang-Yang Liu , Xi-Peng Qiu ,  Xuan-Jing Huang
2022, vol. 19, no. 3,  pp. 169-183, doi: 10.1007/s11633-022-1331-6
Abstract:
In the era of deep learning, modeling for most natural language processing (NLP) tasks has converged into several mainstream paradigms. For example, we usually adopt the sequence labeling paradigm to solve a bundle of tasks such as POS-tagging, named entity recognition (NER), and chunking, and adopt the classification paradigm to solve tasks like sentiment analysis. With the rapid progress of pre-trained language models, recent years have witnessed a rising trend of paradigm shift, which is solving one NLP task in a new paradigm by reformulating the task. The paradigm shift has achieved great success on many tasks and is becoming a promising way to improve model performance. Moreover, some of these paradigms have shown great potential to unify a large number of NLP tasks, making it possible to build a single model to handle diverse tasks. In this paper, we review such phenomenon of paradigm shifts in recent years, highlighting several paradigms that have the potential to solve different NLP tasks.1
Machine Learning for Cataract Classification/Grading on Ophthalmic Imaging Modalities: A Survey
Xiao-Qing Zhang , Yan Hu , Zun-Jie Xiao , Jian-Sheng Fang , Risa Higashita , Jiang Liu
2022, vol. 19, no. 3,  pp. 184-208, doi: 10.1007/s11633-022-1329-0
Abstract:
Cataracts are the leading cause of visual impairment and blindness globally. Over the years, researchers have achieved significant progress in developing state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for automatic cataract classification and grading, aiming to prevent cataracts early and improve clinicians′ diagnosis efficiency. This survey provides a comprehensive survey of recent advances in machine learning techniques for cataract classification/grading based on ophthalmic images. We summarize existing literature from two research directions: conventional machine learning methods and deep learning methods. This survey also provides insights into existing works of both merits and limitations. In addition, we discuss several challenges of automatic cataract classification/grading based on machine learning techniques and present possible solutions to these challenges for future research.
Research Article
Towards Interpretable Defense Against Adversarial Attacks via Causal Inference
Min Ren , Yun-Long Wang , Zhao-Feng He
2022, vol. 19, no. 3,  pp. 209-226, doi: 10.1007/s11633-022-1330-7
Abstract:
Deep learning-based models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Defense against adversarial attacks is essential for sensitive and safety-critical scenarios. However, deep learning methods still lack effective and efficient defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks. Most of the existing methods are just stopgaps for specific adversarial samples. The main obstacle is that how adversarial samples fool the deep learning models is still unclear. The underlying working mechanism of adversarial samples has not been well explored, and it is the bottleneck of adversarial attack defense. In this paper, we build a causal model to interpret the generation and performance of adversarial samples. The self-attention/transformer is adopted as a powerful tool in this causal model. Compared to existing methods, causality enables us to analyze adversarial samples more naturally and intrinsically. Based on this causal model, the working mechanism of adversarial samples is revealed, and instructive analysis is provided. Then, we propose simple and effective adversarial sample detection and recognition methods according to the revealed working mechanism. The causal insights enable us to detect and recognize adversarial samples without any extra model or training. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Our methods outperform the state-of-the-art defense methods under various adversarial attacks.
TwinNet: Twin Structured Knowledge Transfer Network for Weakly Supervised Action Localization
Xiao-Yu Zhang , Hai-Chao Shi , Chang-Sheng Li , Li-Xin Duan
2022, vol. 19, no. 3,  pp. 227-246, doi: 10.1007/s11633-022-1333-4
Abstract:
Action recognition and localization in untrimmed videos is important for many applications and have attracted a lot of attention. Since full supervision with frame-level annotation places an overwhelming burden on manual labeling effort, learning with weak video-level supervision becomes a potential solution. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised framework to recognize actions and locate the corresponding frames in untrimmed videos simultaneously. Considering that there are abundant trimmed videos publicly available and well-segmented with semantic descriptions, the instructive knowledge learned on trimmed videos can be fully leveraged to analyze untrimmed videos. We present an effective knowledge transfer strategy based on inter-class semantic relevance. We also take advantage of the self-attention mechanism to obtain a compact video representation, such that the influence of background frames can be effectively eliminated. A learning architecture is designed with twin networks for trimmed and untrimmed videos, to facilitate transferable self-attentive representation learning. Extensive experiments are conducted on three untrimmed benchmark datasets (i.e., THUMOS14, ActivityNet1.3, and MEXaction2), and the experimental results clearly corroborate the efficacy of our method. It is especially encouraging to see that the proposed weakly supervised method even achieves comparable results to some fully supervised methods.
Dense Face Network: A Dense Face Detector Based on Global Context and Visual Attention Mechanism
Lin Song , Jin-Fu Yang , Qing-Zhen Shang , Ming-Ai Li
2022, vol. 19, no. 3,  pp. 247-256, doi: 10.1007/s11633-022-1327-2
Abstract:
Face detection has achieved tremendous strides thanks to convolutional neural networks. However, dense face detection remains an open challenge due to large face scale variation, tiny faces, and serious occlusion. This paper presents a robust, dense face detector using global context and visual attention mechanisms which can significantly improve detection accuracy. Specifically, a global context fusion module with top-down feedback is proposed to improve the ability to identify tiny faces. Moreover, a visual attention mechanism is employed to solve the problem of occlusion. Experimental results on the public face datasets WIDER FACE and FDDB demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.