Papers

Early detection of lung cancer is crucial for five-year survival of patients. Compared with the pathological analysis and CT scans, the circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) methylation based approach is noninvasive and cost-effective, and thus is one of the most promising methods for early detection of lung cancer. Existing studies on ctDNA methylation data measure the methylation level of each region with a predefined metric, ignoring the positions of methylated CpG sites and methylation patterns, thus are not able to capture the early cancer signals. In this paper, we propose a blood-based lung cancer detection method, and present the first ever study to represent methylation regions by continuous vectors. Specifically, we propose DeepMeth to regard each region as a one-channel image and develop an auto-encoder model to learn its representation. For each ctDNA methylation sample, DeepMeth achieves its representation via concatenating the region vectors. We evaluate DeepMeth on a multicenter clinical dataset collected from 14 hospitals. The experiments show that DeepMeth achieves about 5%-8% improvements compared with the baselines in terms of Area Under the Curve (AUC). Moreover, the experiments also demonstrate that DeepMeth can be combined with traditional scalar metrics to enhance the diagnostic power of ctDNA methylation classifiers. DeepMeth has been clinically deployed and applied to 450 patients from 94 hospitals nationally since April 2020.

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Masked Language Models (MLMs) have shown superior performances in numerous downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Unfortunately, MLMs also demonstrate significantly worrying levels of social biases. We show that the previously proposed evaluation metrics for quantifying the social biases in MLMs are problematic due to the following reasons: (1) prediction accuracy of the masked tokens itself tend to be low in some MLMs, which leads to unreliable evaluation metrics, and (2) in most downstream NLP tasks, masks are not used; therefore prediction of the mask is not directly related to them, and (3) high-frequency words in the training data are masked more often, introducing noise due to this selection bias in the test cases. Therefore, we propose All Unmasked Likelihood (AUL), a bias evaluation measure that predicts \emph{all} tokens in a test case given the MLM embedding of the \emph{unmasked} input and AUL with Attention weights (AULA) to evaluate tokens based on their importance in a sentence. Our experimental results show that the proposed bias evaluation measures accurately detect different types of biases in MLMs, and unlike AUL and AULA, previously proposed measures for MLMs systematically overestimate the measured biases and are heavily influenced by the unmasked tokens in the context.

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Particle physics simulations are the cornerstone of nuclear engineering applications. Among them radiotherapy (RT) is crucial for society, with 50% of cancer patients receiving radiation treatments. For the most precise targeting of tumors, next generation RT treatments aim for real-time correction during radiation delivery, necessitating particle transport algorithms that yield precise dose distributions in sub-second times even in highly heterogeneous patient geometries. This is infeasible with currently available, purely physics based simulations. In this study, we present a data-driven dose calculation algorithm predicting the dose deposited by mono-energetic proton beams for arbitrary energies and patient geometries. Our approach frames particle transport as sequence modeling, where convolutional layers extract important spatial features into tokens and the transformer self-attention mechanism routes information between such tokens in the sequence and a beam energy token. We train our network and evaluate prediction accuracy using computationally expensive but accurate Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, considered the gold standard in particle physics. Our proposed model is 33 times faster than current clinical analytic pencil beam algorithms, improving upon their accuracy in the most heterogeneous and challenging geometries. With a relative error of 0.34±0.2% and very high gamma pass rate of 99.59±0.7% (1%, 3 mm), it also greatly outperforms the only published similar data-driven proton dose algorithm, even at a finer grid resolution. Offering MC precision 4000 times faster, our model could overcome a major obstacle that has so far prohibited real-time adaptive proton treatments and significantly increase cancer treatment efficacy. Its potential to model physics interactions of other particles could also boost heavy ion treatment planning procedures limited by the speed of traditional methods.

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Detecting depression based on non-verbal behaviors has received great attention. However, most prior work on detecting depression mainly focused on detecting depressed individuals in laboratory settings, which are difficult to be generalized in practice. In addition, little attention has been paid to analyzing the non-verbal behaviors of depressed individuals in the wild. Therefore, in this paper, we present a multimodal depression dataset, D-Vlog, which consists of 961 vlogs (i.e., around 160 hours) collected from YouTube, which can be utilized in developing depression detection models based on the non-verbal behavior of individuals in real-world scenario. We develop a multimodal deep learning model that uses acoustic and visual features extracted from collected data to detect depression. Our proposed model employs the cross-attention mechanism to effectively capture the relationship across acoustic and visual features, and generates useful multimodal representations for depression detection. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms other baseline models. We believe our dataset and the proposed model are useful for analyzing and detecting depressed individuals based on non-verbal behavior.

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Structural Equation/Causal Models (SEMs/SCMs) are widely used in epidemiology and social sciences to identify and analyze the average treatment effect (ATE) and conditional ATE (CATE). Traditional causal effect estimation methods such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and more recently Regression-With-Residuals (RWR) are widely used - as they avoid the challenging task of identifying the SCM parameters - to estimate ATE and CATE. However, much work remains before traditional estimation methods can be used for counterfactual inference, and for the benefit of Personalized Public Policy Analysis (P$^3$A) in the social sciences. While doctors rely on personalized medicine to tailor treatments to patients in laboratory settings (relatively closed systems), P$^3$A draws inspiration from such tailoring but adapts it for open social systems. In this article, we develop a method for counterfactual inference that we name causal-Graphical Normalizing Flow (c-GNF), facilitating P$^3$A. A major advantage of c-GNF is that it suits the open system in which P$^3$A is conducted. First, we show how c-GNF captures the underlying SCM without making any assumption about functional forms. This capturing capability is enabled by the deep neural networks that model the underlying SCM via observational data likelihood maximization using gradient descent. Second, we propose a novel dequantization trick to deal with discrete variables, which is a limitation of normalizing flows in general. Third, we demonstrate in experiments that c-GNF performs on-par with IPW and RWR in terms of bias and variance for estimating the ATE, when the true functional forms are known, and better when they are unknown. Fourth and most importantly, we conduct counterfactual inference with c-GNFs, demonstrating promising empirical performance. Because IPW and RWR, like other traditional methods, lack the capability of counterfactual inference, c-GNFs will likely play a major role in tailoring personalized treatment, facilitating P$^3$A, optimizing social interventions - in contrast to the current `one-size-fits-all' approach of existing methods.

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Understanding how a city’s physical appearance and environmental surroundings impact society traits, such as safety, is an essential issue in social artificial intelligence. To demonstrate the relationship, most existing studies utilize subjective human perceptual attributes, categorization only for a few violent crimes, and images taken from still shot images. These lead to difficulty in identifying location-specific characteristics for urban safety. In this work, to address this problem, we propose a large-scale dataset and a novel method by adopting a concept of “Deviance" which explains behaviors violating social norms, both formally (e.g. crime) and informally (e.g. civil complaints). We first collect a geo-tagged dataset consisting of incident report data for seven metropolitan cities, with corresponding sequential images around incident sites obtained from Google street view. We also design a convolutional neural network that learns spatio-temporal visual attributes of deviant streets. Experimental results show that our framework can reliably recognize real-world deviance in various cities. Furthermore, we analyze which visual attribute is important for deviance identification and severity estimation. We have released our dataset and source codes at our project page: https://deviance-project.github.io/DevianceNet/

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With widening deployments of natural language processing (NLP) in daily life, inherited social biases from NLP models have become more severe and problematic. Previous studies have shown that word embeddings trained on human-generated corpora have strong gender biases that can produce discriminative results in downstream tasks. Previous debiasing methods focus mainly on modeling bias and only implicitly consider semantic information while completely overlooking the complex underlying causal structure among bias and semantic components. To address these issues, we propose a novel methodology that leverages a causal inference framework to effectively remove gender bias. The proposed method allows us to construct and analyze the complex causal mechanisms facilitating gender information flow while retaining oracle semantic information within word embeddings. Our comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in gender-debiasing tasks. In addition, our methods yield better performance in word similarity evaluation and various extrinsic downstream NLP tasks.

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Object detection in high-resolution satellite imagery is emerging as a scalable alternative to on-the-ground survey data collection in many environmental and socioeconomic monitoring applications. However, performing object detection over large geographies can still be prohibitively expensive due to the high cost of purchasing imagery and compute. Inspired by traditional survey data collection strategies, we propose an approach to estimate object count statistics over large geographies through sampling. Given a cost budget, our method selects a small number of representative areas by sampling from a learnable proposal distribution. Using importance sampling, we are able to accurately estimate object counts after processing only a small fraction of the images compared to an exhaustive approach. We show empirically that the proposed framework achieves strong performance on estimating the number of buildings in the United States and Africa, cars in Kenya, brick kilns in Bangladesh, and swimming pools in the U.S., while requiring as few as 0.01% of satellite images compared to an exhaustive approach.

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The expression of displeasure on a consumer’s behalf towards an organization, product, or event is denoted via the speech act known as complaint. Customers typically post reviews on retail websites and various social media platforms about the products or services they purchase, and the reviews may include complaints about the products or services. Automatic detection of consumers' complaints about items or services they buy can be critical for organizations and online merchants. Since they can use this insight to meet the customers' requirements, including handling and addressing the complaints. Previous studies on Complaint Identification (CI) are limited to text. Images posted with the reviews can provide cues to better identify complaints, thus emphasizing the importance of incorporating multi-modal inputs into the process. Furthermore, the customer's emotional state has a significant impact on the complaint expression, since any speech act is generally influenced by emotions. As a result, the impact of emotion and sentiment on automatic complaint identification must also be investigated. One of the major contributions of this work is a new dataset- Complaint, Emotion, and Sentiment Annotated Multi-modal Amazon Reviews Dataset (CESAMARD) which is a collection of opinionated texts (reviews) and images of the products posted on the website of the retail giant Amazon. We present an attention-based multi-modal, adversarial multi-task deep neural network model for complaint detection to demonstrate the utility of the multi-modal dataset. Experimental results indicate that the multi-modality and multi-tasking complaint identification outperforms uni-modal and single-task variants.

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High-resolution daytime satellite imagery has become a promising source to study economic activities. These images display detailed terrain over large areas and allow zooming into smaller neighborhoods. Existing methods, however, have utilized images only in a single-level geographical unit. This research presents a deep learning model to predict economic indicators via aggregating traits observed from multiple levels of geographical units. The model first measures hyperlocal economy over small communities via ordinal regression. The next step extracts district-level features by summarizing interconnection among hyperlocal economies. In the final step, the model estimates economic indicators of districts via aggregating the hyperlocal and district information. Our new multi-level learning model substantially outperforms strong baselines in predicting key indicators such as population, purchasing power, and energy consumption. The model is also robust against data shortage; the trained features from one country can generalize to other countries when evaluated with data gathered from Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. We discuss the multi-level model's implications for measuring inequality, which is the essential first step in policy and social science research on inequality and poverty.

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Knowledge of the changing traffic is critical in risk management. Customs offices worldwide have traditionally relied on local resources to accumulate such knowledge and detect tax frauds. This naturally poses countries with weak infrastructure to become tax havens of potentially illicit trades. The current paper proposes DAS, a memory bank platform to facilitate knowledge sharing across multi-national customs administrations to support each other. We propose a domain adaptation method to share transferable knowledge of frauds as prototypes while safeguarding the local trade information. Data encompassing over 8 million import declarations have been used to test the feasibility of this new system, which shows that participating countries may benefit up to 2-11 times in fraud detection with the help of shared knowledge. We discuss implications for substantial tax revenue potential and strengthened policy against illicit trades.

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Assessing the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on economies is fundamental to tailor the responses of the governments to recover from the crisis. In this paper, we present a novel approach to assessing the economic impact with a large-scale credit card transaction dataset at a fine granularity. For this purpose, we develop a fine-grained economic-epidemiological modeling framework COVID-EENet, which is featured with a two-level deep neural network. In support of the fine-grained EEM, COVID-EENet learns the impact of nearby mass infection cases on the changes of local economies in each district. Through the experiments using the nationwide dataset, given a set of active mass infection cases, COVID-EENet is shown to precisely predict the sales changes in two or four weeks for each district and business category. Therefore, policymakers can be informed of the predictive impact to put in the most effective mitigation measures. Overall, we believe that our work opens a new perspective of using financial data to recover from the economic crisis. For public use in this urgent problem, we release the source code at https://github.com/kaist-dmlab/COVID-EENet.

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Electricity forecasting has important implications for the key decisions in modern electricity systems, ranging from power generation, transmission, distribution and so on. In the literature, traditional statistic approaches, machine-learning methods and deep learning (e.g., recurrent neural network) based models are utilized to model the trends and patterns in electricity time-series data. However, they are restricted either by their deterministic forms or by independence in probabilistic assumptions -- thereby neglecting the uncertainty or significant correlations between distributions of electricity data. Ignoring these, in turn, may yield error accumulation, especially when relying on historical data and aiming at multi-step prediction. To overcome these, we propose a novel method named Probabilistic Electricity Forecasting (PrEF) by proposing a non-linear neural state space model (SSM) and incorporating copula-augmented mechanism into that, which can learn uncertainty-dependencies knowledge and understand interactive relationships between various factors from large-scale electricity time-series data. Our method distinguishes itself from existing models by its traceable inference procedure and its capability of providing high-quality probabilistic distribution predictions. Extensive experiments on two real-world electricity datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the alternatives.

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The daily practice of sharing images on social media raises a severe issue about privacy leakage. To address the issue, privacy-leaking image detection is studied recently, with the goal to automatically identify images that may leak privacy. Recent advance on this task benefits from focusing on crucial objects via pretrained object detectors and modeling their correlation. However, these methods have two limitations: 1) they neglect other important elements like scenes, textures, and objects beyond the capacity of pretrained object detectors. 2) the correlation among objects is fixed, but a fixed correlation is not appropriate for all the images. To overcome the limitations, we propose the Dynamic Region-Aware Graph Convolutional Network (DRAG) that dynamically finds out crucial regions including objects and other important elements, and model their correlation adaptively for each input image. To find out crucial regions, we cluster spatially-correlated feature channels into several region-aware feature maps. Furthermore, we dynamically model the correlation with the self-attention mechanism and explore the interaction among the regions with a graph convolutional network. The DRAG achieved an accuracy of 87% on the largest dataset for privacy-leaking image detection, which is 10 percentage points higher than the state of the art. The further case study demonstrates that it found out crucial regions containing not only objects but other important elements like textures. The code and more details are in https://github.com/guang-yanng/DRAG.

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The prosperity of mobile and financial technologies has bred and expanded various kinds of financial products to a broader scope of people, which contributes to financial inclusion. It brings non-trivial social benefits of diminishing financial inequality. However, the technical challenges in individual financial risk evaluation exacerbated by the unforeseen user characteristic distribution and limited credit history of new users, as well as the inexperience of newly-entered companies in handling complex data and obtaining accurate labels, impede further promotion of financial inclusion. To tackle these challenges, this paper develops a novel transfer learning algorithm (i.e., TransBoost) that combines the merits of tree-based models and kernel methods. The TransBoost is designed with a parallel tree structure and efficient weights updating mechanism with theoretical guarantee, which enables it to excel in tackling real-world data with high dimensional features and sparsity in O(n) time complexity. We conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets and a unique largescale dataset from Tencent Mobile Payment. The results show that the TransBoost outperforms other state-of-the- art benchmark transfer learning algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy with superior efficiency, demonstrate stronger robustness to data sparsity, and provide meaningful model interpretation. Besides, given a financial risk level, the TransBoost enables financial service providers to serve the largest number of users including those who would otherwise be excluded by other algorithms. That is, the TransBoost improves financial inclusion.

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Air pollution is one of the leading causes of mortality globally, resulting in millions of deaths each year. Efficient monitoring is important to measure exposure and enforce legal limits. New low-cost sensors can be deployed in greater numbers and in more varied locations, motivating the problem of efficient automated placement. Previous work suggests Bayesian optimisation is an appropriate method, but only considered a satellite data set, with data aggregated over all altitudes. It is ground-level pollution, that humans breathe, which matters most. We improve on those results using hierarchical models and evaluate our models on urban pollution data in London to show that Bayesian optimisation can be successfully applied to the problem.

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Multilingual neural machine translation architectures mainly differ in the number of sharing modules and parameters applied among languages. In this paper, and from an algorithmic perspective, we explore whether the chosen architecture, when trained with the same data, influences the level of gender bias. Experiments conducted in three language pairs show that language-specific encoder-decoders exhibit less bias than the shared architecture. We propose two methods for interpreting and studying gender bias in machine translation based on source embeddings and attention. Our analysis shows that, in the language-specific case, the embeddings encode more gender information, and their attention is more diverted. Both behaviors help in mitigating gender bias.

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Infectious disease forecasting has been a key focus in the recent past owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and has proved to be an important tool in controlling the pandemic. With the advent of reliable spatiotemporal data, graph neural network models have been able to successfully model the inter-relation between the cross-region signals to produce quality forecasts, but like most deep-learning models they do not explicitly incorporate the underlying causal mechanisms. In this work, we employ a causal mechanistic model to guide the learning of the graph embeddings and propose a novel learning framework -- \textbf{Causal}-based \textbf{G}raph \textbf{N}eural \textbf{N}etwork (CausalGNN) that learns spatiotemporal embedding in a latent space where graph input features and epidemiological context are combined via a mutually learning mechanism using graph-based non-linear transformations. We design an attention-based dynamic GNN module to capture spatial and temporal disease dynamics. A causal module is added to the framework to provide epidemiological context for node embedding via ordinary differential equations. Extensive experiments on forecasting daily new cases of COVID-19 at global, US state, and US county levels show that the proposed method can improve performance by up to 7\% when compared with a broad range of baselines. The learned model which incorporates epidemiological context organizes the embedding in an efficient way by keeping the parameter size small leading to robust and accurate forecasting performance across various datasets.

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Recent works in artificial intelligence fairness attempt to mitigate discrimination by proposing constrained optimization programs that achieve parity for some fairness statistic. Most assume availability of the class label, which is impractical in many real-world applications such as precision medicine, actuarial analysis and recidivism prediction. Here we consider fairness in longitudinal right-censored environments, where the time to event might be unknown, resulting in censorship of the class label and inapplicability of existing fairness studies. We devise applicable fairness measures, propose a debiasing algorithm to bridge fairness with and without censorship, and provide necessary theoretical constructs for these important and socially-sensitive tasks. Our experiments on four censored datasets confirm the utility of our approach.

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