Domain generalisation in computational histopathology is challenging because the images are substantially affected by differences among hospitals due to factors like fixation and staining of tissue and imaging equipment. We hypothesise that focusing on nuclei can improve the out-of-domain (OOD) generalisation in cancer detection. We propose a simple approach to improve OOD generalisation for cancer detection by focusing on nuclear morphology and organisation, as these are domain-invariant features critical in cancer detection. Our approach integrates original images with nuclear segmentation masks during training, encouraging the model to prioritise nuclei and their spatial arrangement. Going beyond mere data augmentation, we introduce a regularisation technique that aligns the representations of masks and original images. We show, using multiple datasets, that our method improves OOD generalisation and also leads to increased robustness to image corruptions and adversarial attacks. The source code is available at https://github.com/undercutspiky/SFL/

While the evaluation of explanations is an important step towards trustworthy models, it needs to be done carefully, and the employed metrics need to be well-understood. Specifically model randomization testing can be overinterpreted if regarded as a primary criterion for selecting or discarding explanation methods. To address shortcomings of this test, we start by observing an experimental gap in the ranking of explanation methods between randomization-based sanity checks [1] and model output faithfulness measures (e.g. [20]). We identify limitations of model-randomization-based sanity checks for the purpose of evaluating explanations. Firstly, we show that uninformative attribution maps created with zero pixel-wise covariance easily achieve high scores in this type of checks. Secondly, we show that top-down model randomization preserves scales of forward pass activations with high probability. That is, channels with large activations have a high probility to contribute strongly to the output, even after randomization of the network on top of them. Hence, explanations after randomization can only be expected to differ to a certain extent. This explains the observed experimental gap. In summary, these results demonstrate the inadequacy of model-randomization-based sanity checks as a criterion to rank attribution methods.

When neural networks are employed for high-stakes decision-making, it is desirable that they provide explanations for their prediction in order for us to understand the features that have contributed to the decision. At the same time, it is important to flag potential outliers for in-depth verification by domain experts. In this work we propose to unify two differing aspects of explainability with outlier detection. We argue for a broader adoption of prototype-based student networks capable of providing an example-based explanation for their prediction and at the same time identify regions of similarity between the predicted sample and the examples. The examples are real prototypical cases sampled from the training set via a novel iterative prototype replacement algorithm. Furthermore, we propose to use the prototype similarity scores for identifying outliers. We compare performance in terms of the classification, explanation quality and outlier detection of our proposed network with baselines. We show that our prototype-based networks extending beyond similarity kernels deliver meaningful explanations and promising outlier detection results without compromising classification accuracy.

The success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in various applications is accompanied by a significant increase in computation and parameter storage costs. Recent efforts to reduce these overheads involve pruning and compressing the weights of various layers while at the same time aiming to not sacrifice performance. In this paper, we propose a novel criterion for CNN pruning inspired by neural network interpretability: The most relevant units, i.e. weights or filters, are automatically found using their relevance scores obtained from concepts of explainable AI (XAI). By exploring this idea, we connect the lines of interpretability and model compression research. We show that our proposed method can efficiently prune CNN models in transfer-learning setups in which networks pre-trained on large corpora are adapted to specialized tasks. The method is evaluated on a broad range of computer vision datasets. Notably, our novel criterion is not only competitive or better compared to state-of-the-art pruning criteria when successive retraining is performed, but clearly outperforms these previous criteria in the resource-constrained application scenario in which the data of the task to be transferred to is very scarce and one chooses to refrain from fine-tuning. Our method is able to compress the model iteratively while maintaining or even improving accuracy. At the same time, it has a computational cost in the order of gradient computation and is comparatively simple to apply without the need for tuning hyperparameters for pruning.

With the recent rise of cryptocurrencies' popularity, the security and management of crypto-tokens have become critical. We have witnessed many attacks on users and providers, which have resulted in significant financial losses. To remedy these issues, several wallet solutions have been proposed. However, these solutions often lack either essential security features, usability, or do not allow users to customize their spending rules. In this paper, we propose SmartOTPs, a smart-contract wallet framework that gives a flexible, usable, and secure way of managing crypto-tokens in a self-sovereign fashion. The proposed framework consists of four components (i.e., an authenticator, a client, a hardware wallet, and a smart contract), and it provides 2-factor authentication (2FA) performed in two stages of interaction with the blockchain. To the best of our knowledge, our framework is the first one that utilizes one-time passwords (OTPs) in the setting of the public blockchain. In SmartOTPs, the OTPs are aggregated by a Merkle tree and hash chains whereby for each authentication only a short OTP (e.g., 16B-long) is transferred from the authenticator to the client. Such a novel setting enables us to make a fully air-gapped authenticator by utilizing small QR codes or a few mnemonic words, while additionally offering resilience against quantum cryptanalysis. We have made a proof-of-concept based on the Ethereum platform. Our cost analysis shows that the average cost of a transfer operation is comparable to existing 2FA solutions using smart contracts with multi-signatures.

Integrated Gradients as an attribution method for deep neural network models offers simple implementability. However, it suffers from noisiness of explanations which affects the ease of interpretability. The SmoothGrad technique is proposed to solve the noisiness issue and smoothen the attribution maps of any gradient-based attribution method. In this paper, we present SmoothTaylor as a novel theoretical concept bridging Integrated Gradients and SmoothGrad, from the Taylor's theorem perspective. We apply the methods to the image classification problem, using the ILSVRC2012 ImageNet object recognition dataset, and a couple of pretrained image models to generate attribution maps. These attribution maps are empirically evaluated using quantitative measures for sensitivity and noise level. We further propose adaptive noising to optimize for the noise scale hyperparameter value. From our experiments, we find that the SmoothTaylor approach together with adaptive noising is able to generate better quality saliency maps with lesser noise and higher sensitivity to the relevant points in the input space as compared to Integrated Gradients.

Cross-domain few-shot classification task (CD-FSC) combines few-shot classification with the requirement to generalize across domains represented by datasets. This setup faces challenges originating from the limited labeled data in each class and, additionally, from the domain shift between training and test sets. In this paper, we introduce a novel training approach for existing FSC models. It leverages on the explanation scores, obtained from existing explanation methods when applied to the predictions of FSC models, computed for intermediate feature maps of the models. Firstly, we tailor the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) method to explain the predictions of FSC models. Secondly, we develop a model-agnostic explanation-guided training strategy that dynamically finds and emphasizes the features which are important for the predictions. Our contribution does not target a novel explanation method but lies in a novel application of explanations for the training phase. We show that explanation-guided training effectively improves the model generalization. We observe improved accuracy for three different FSC models: RelationNet, cross attention network, and a graph neural network-based formulation, on five few-shot learning datasets: miniImagenet, CUB, Cars, Places, and Plantae. The source code is available https://github.com/SunJiamei/few-shot-lrp-guided.

Adversarial attacks have been a prevalent problem causing misclassification in machine learning models, with stochasticity being a promising direction towards greater robustness. However, stochastic networks frequently underperform compared to deterministic deep networks. In this work, we present a conceptually clear adaptive noise injection mechanism in combination with teacher-initialisation, which adjusts its degree of randomness dynamically through the computation of mini-batch statistics. This mechanism is embedded within a simple framework to obtain stochastic networks from existing deterministic networks. Our experiments show that our method is able to outperform prior baselines under white-box settings, exemplified through CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. Following which, we perform in-depth analysis on varying different components of training with our approach on the effects of robustness and accuracy, through the study of the evolution of decision boundary and trend curves of clean accuracy/attack success over differing degrees of stochasticity. We also shed light on the effects of adversarial training on a pre-trained network, through the lens of decision boundaries.

Anomaly detection algorithms find extensive use in various fields. This area of research has recently made great advances thanks to deep learning. A recent method, the deep Support Vector Data Description (deep SVDD), which is inspired by the classic kernel-based Support Vector Data Description (SVDD), is capable of simultaneously learning a feature representation of the data and a data-enclosing hypersphere. The method has shown promising results in both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. However, deep SVDD suffers from hypersphere collapse-also known as mode collapse-, if the architecture of the model does not comply with certain architectural constraints, e.g. the removal of bias terms. These constraints limit the adaptability of the model and in some cases, may affect the model performance due to learning suboptimal features. In this work, we consider two regularizers to prevent hypersphere collapse in deep SVDD. The first regularizer is based on injecting random noise via the standard cross-entropy loss. The second regularizer penalizes the minibatch variance when it becomes too small. Moreover, we introduce an adaptive weighting scheme to control the amount of penalization between the SVDD loss and the respective regularizer. Our proposed regularized variants of deep SVDD show encouraging results and outperform a prominent state-of-the-art method on a setup where the anomalies have no apparent geometrical structure.

Within the last decade, neural network based predictors have demonstrated impressive - and at times superhuman - capabilities. This performance is often paid for with an intransparent prediction process and thus has sparked numerous contributions in the novel field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). In this paper, we focus on a popular and widely used method of XAI, the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP). Since its initial proposition LRP has evolved as a method, and a best practice for applying the method has tacitly emerged, based however on humanly observed evidence alone. In this paper we investigate - and for the first time quantify - the effect of this current best practice on feedforward neural networks in a visual object detection setting. The results verify that the layer-dependent approach to LRP applied in recent literature better represents the model's reasoning, and at the same time increases the object localization and class discriminativity of LRP.

Recently conducted research demonstrated the potential use of mouse dynamics as a behavioral biometric for user authentication systems. However, the state-of-the-art methods in this field rely on classical machine learning methods that necessitate the design of hand crafted mouse features for feature extraction. To simplify the feature extraction process, we leverage various deep learning architectures for mouse movement sequences classification, including convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and a hybrid model which combines convolutional and recurrent layers. It is known that the training of these networks with random initialization of weights on small datasets will produce models that perform poorly. Therefore, we consider a two-dimensional convolutional neural network that allows transfer learning, which is a domain adaptation technique effective for learning on small datasets. Although employing such architecture may seem counterintuitive, since the temporal information is discarded from the input data, the architecture has outperformed all the other deep architectures investigated, as well as a classical machine learning method. In order to understand the features learned, we adopt the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) algorithm to compute relevance scores for each part of the mouse curves. In addition, the models are measured for their usability and effectiveness in realistic scenarios.

Explanation methods for deep neural networks (DNN) such as LRP [1], PatternAttribution [2], LIME [3], DeepLIFT [4] have promoted the explanation of convolutional neural networks (CNN). Results are obtained mostly using ReLU activation function. In this paper, we investigate the performance of explanation methods on neural networks with sigmoid activations like sigmoid and tanh. PatternAttribution is a recent approach which allows learning explanation patterns from data. We show that the saturated zones of sigmoids pose difficulties for PatternAttribution. In order to solve these issues, as a first novelty, we generalize global explanations to piece-wise dependent explanations. In a second contribution, we learn the parameters of PatternAttribution in near-linear activation zones of the sigmoids, while replacing it with LRP in the saturated zones. Finally, we introduce and evaluate direct layer-wise Taylor approximation to show that LRP as a deep-Taylor-motivated approach outperforms the ad-hoc application of Taylor approximation. We show results on MNIST and also on LSTM and GRU networks used for two sentiment classification tasks as important application cases of models using sigmoids. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method, Piece-wise PAtternLRP (PPAP), outperforms PatternAttribution as well as LRP for networks with sigmoids, thus combining their strengths effectively.

Mouse dynamics is a potential means of authenticating users. Typically, the authentication process is based on classical machine learning techniques, but recently, deep learning techniques have been introduced for this purpose. Although prior research has demonstrated how machine learning and deep learning algorithms can be bypassed by carefully crafted adversarial samples, there has been very little research performed on the topic of behavioural biometrics in the adversarial domain. In an attempt to address this gap, we built a set of attacks, which are applications of several generative approaches, to construct adversarial mouse trajectories that bypass authentication models. These generated mouse sequences will serve as the adversarial samples in the context of our experiments. We also present an analysis of the attack approaches we explored, explaining their limitations. In contrast to previous work, we consider the attacks in a more realistic and challenging setting in which an attacker has access to recorded user data but does not have access to the authentication model or its outputs. We explore three different attack strategies: 1) statistics-based, 2) imitation-based, and 3) surrogate-based; we show that they are able to evade the functionality of the authentication models, thereby impacting their robustness adversely. We show that imitation-based attacks often perform better than surrogate-based attacks, unless, however, the attacker can guess the architecture of the authentication model. In such cases, we propose a potential detection mechanism against surrogate-based attacks.

The recent advance of deep learning has enabled trading algorithms to predict stock price movements more accurately. Unfortunately, there is a significant gap in the real-world deployment of this breakthrough. For example, professional traders in their long-term careers have accumulated numerous trading rules, the myth of which they can understand quite well. On the other hand, deep learning models have been hardly interpretable. This paper presents DeepClue, a system built to bridge text-based deep learning models and end users through visually interpreting the key factors learned in the stock price prediction model. We make three contributions in DeepClue. First, by designing the deep neural network architecture for interpretation and applying an algorithm to extract relevant predictive factors, we provide a useful case on what can be interpreted out of the prediction model for end users. Second, by exploring hierarchies over the extracted factors and displaying these factors in an interactive, hierarchical visualization interface, we shed light on how to effectively communicate the interpreted model to end users. Specially, the interpretation separates the predictables from the unpredictables for stock prediction through the use of intercept model parameters and a risk visualization design. Third, we evaluate the integrated visualization system through two case studies in predicting the stock price with financial news and company-related tweets from social media. Quantitative experiments comparing the proposed neural network architecture with state-of-the-art models and the human baseline are conducted and reported. Feedbacks from an informal user study with domain experts are summarized and discussed in details. The study results demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepClue in helping to complete stock market investment and analysis tasks.

Despite the great advances made by deep learning in many machine learning problems, there is a relative dearth of deep learning approaches for anomaly detection. Those approaches which do exist involve networks trained to perform a task other than anomaly detection, namely generative models or compression, which are in turn adapted for use in anomaly detection; they are not trained on an anomaly detection based objective. In this paper we introduce a new anomaly detection method—Deep Support Vector Data Description—, which is trained on an anomaly detection based objective. The adaptation to the deep regime necessitates that our neural network and training procedure satisfy certain properties, which we demonstrate theoretically. We show the effectiveness of our method on MNIST and CIFAR-10 image benchmark datasets as well as on the detection of adversarial examples of GTSRB stop signs.

Nonlinear methods such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are the gold standard for various challenging machine learning problems such as image recognition. Although these methods perform impressively well, they have a significant disadvantage, the lack of transparency, limiting the interpretability of the solution and thus the scope of application in practice. Especially DNNs act as black boxes due to their multilayer nonlinear structure. In this paper we introduce a novel methodology for interpreting generic multilayer neural networks by decomposing the network classification decision into contributions of its input elements. Although our focus is on image classification, the method is applicable to a broad set of input data, learning tasks and network architectures. Our method called deep Taylor decomposition efficiently utilizes the structure of the network by backpropagating the explanations from the output to the input layer. We evaluate the proposed method empirically on the MNIST and ILSVRC data sets.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance in complex machine learning tasks such as image classification or speech recognition. However, due to their multilayer nonlinear structure, they are not transparent, i.e., it is hard to grasp what makes them arrive at a particular classification or recognition decision, given a new unseen data sample. Recently, several approaches have been proposed enabling one to understand and interpret the reasoning embodied in a DNN for a single test image. These methods quantify the “importance” of individual pixels with respect to the classification decision and allow a visualization in terms of a heatmap in pixel/input space. While the usefulness of heatmaps can be judged subjectively by a human, an objective quality measure is missing. In this paper, we present a general methodology based on region perturbation for evaluating ordered collections of pixels such as heatmaps. We compare heatmaps computed by three different methods on the SUN397, ILSVRC2012, and MIT Places data sets. Our main result is that the recently proposed layer-wise relevance propagation algorithm qualitatively and quantitatively provides a better explanation of what made a DNN arrive at a particular classification decision than the sensitivity-based approach or the deconvolution method. We provide theoretical arguments to explain this result and discuss its practical implications. Finally, we investigate the use of heatmaps for unsupervised assessment of the neural network performance.

We propose a localized approach to multiple kernel learning that can be formulated as a convex optimization problem over a given cluster structure. For which we obtain generalization error guarantees and derive an optimization algorithm based on the Fenchel dual representation. Experiments on real-world datasets from the application domains of computational biology and computer vision show that convex localized multiple kernel learning can achieve higher prediction accuracies than its global and non-convex local counterparts.

Fisher vector (FV) classifiers and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are popular and successful algorithms for solving image classification problems. However, both are generally considered 'black box' predictors as the non-linear transformations involved have so far prevented transparent and interpretable reasoning. Recently, a principled technique, Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), has been developed in order to better comprehend the inherent structured reasoning of complex nonlinear classification models such as Bag of Feature models or DNNs. In this paper we (1) extend the LRP framework also for Fisher vector classifiers and then use it as analysis tool to (2) quantify the importance of context for classification, (3) qualitatively compare DNNs against FV classifiers in terms of important image regions and (4) detect potential flaws and biases in data. All experiments are performed on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and ILSVRC 2012 data sets.

We present an application of the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) algorithm to state of the art deep convolutional neural networks and Fisher Vector classifiers to compare the image perception and prediction strategies of both classifiers with the use of visualized heatmaps. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) is a method to compute scores for individual components of an input image, denoting their contribution to the prediction of the classifier for one particular test point. We demonstrate the impact of different choices of decomposition cut-off points during the LRP-process, controlling the resolution and semantics of the heatmap on test images from the PASCAL VOC 2007 test data set.

The Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) algorithm explains a classifier's prediction specific to a given data point by attributing relevance scores to important components of the input by using the topology of the learned model itself. With the LRP Toolbox we provide platform-agnostic implementations for explaining the predictions of pre-trained state of the art Caffe networks and stand-alone implementations for fully connected Neural Network models. The implementations for Matlab and python shall serve as a playing field to familiarize oneself with the LRP algorithm and are implemented with readability and transparency in mind. Models and data can be imported and exported using raw text formats, Matlab's .mat files and the .npy format for numpy or plain text.

This paper studies the generalization performance of multi-class classification algorithms, for which we obtain, for the first time, a data-dependent generalization error bound with a logarithmic dependence on the class size, substantially improving the state-of-the-art linear dependence in the existing data-dependent generalization analysis. The theoretical analysis motivates us to introduce a new multi-class classification machine based on lp-norm regularization, where the parameter p controls the complexity of the corresponding bounds. We derive an efficient optimization algorithm based on Fenchel duality theory. Benchmarks on several real-world datasets show that the proposed algorithm can achieve significant accuracy gains over the state of the art.

In many real-world applications, the simplified assumption of independent and identically distributed noise breaks down, and labels can have structured, systematic noise. For example, in brain-computer interface applications, training data is often the result of lengthy experimental sessions, where the attention levels of participants can change over the course of the experiment. In such application cases, structured label noise will cause problems because most machine learning methods assume independent and identically distributed label noise. In this paper, we present a novel methodology for learning and evaluation in presence of systematic label noise. The core of which is a novel extension of support vector data description / one-class SVM that can incorporate latent variables. Controlled simulations on synthetic data and a real-world EEG experiment with 20 subjects from the domain of brain-computer-interfacing show that our method achieves accuracies that go beyond the state of the art.

High-quality positioning is of fundamental importance for an increasing variety of advanced driver assistance systems. GNSS-based systems are predominant outdoors but usually fail in enclosed areas where a direct line-of-sight to satellites is unavailable. For those scenarios, external infrastructure-based positioning systems are a promising alternative. However, external position detections have no identity information as they may belong to any object, i.e. they are anonymous. Moreover, the area covered by external sensors may contain gaps where objects cannot be observed leading to a correspondence problem between multiple detections and actual objects. We present a global tracking-by-identification approach as extension to existing local trackers that uses odometry sensor data of vehicles to find the corresponding subset of external detections. Thus, our approach enables the assignment of anonymous external detections to a specific vehicular endpoint and the estimation of its current position without requiring an initial location. The problem is decomposed resulting in a two step approach. The first algorithm determines possible track segment combinations which are used as track hypotheses. The track hypothesis generation algorithm considers spatio-temporal relationships between track segments, thus avoiding exponentially growing complexity inherent to data association problems. The second algorithm compares track hypotheses to the relative vehicle trajectory using pseudo-distance correlation metrics. In a detailed evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to reliably perform global tracking and identification of camera-observed vehicles in real-time, despite relatively large coverage gaps of the external sensors.

Vehicular positioning technologies enable a broad range of applications and services such as navigation systems, driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles. However, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) do not work in enclosed areas such as parking garages. For these scenarios, a wide range of indoor positioning technologies are available inside the vehicle (internal) and based on infrastructure (external). Based on our previous work, we use off-the-shelf network video cameras to detect the position of moving vehicles within the parking garage in multiple non-overlapping camera views. Towards the goal of using this system as positioning source for vehicles, detected positions need to be transmitted to the communication endpoint in the correct vehicle. The key problem thereby is the association of the externally-observed position to the endpoint in the corresponding vehicle. State-of-the-art tracking-by-detection techniques can differentiate multiple camera-detected vehicles but the generated tracks are anonymous and cannot inherently be associated to the corresponding vehicle. To bridge this gap, we present a tracking-by-identification solution which analyzes vehicle movement patterns by multiple vehicle sensor modalities and compares them with camera-detected tracks to identify the track with the best correlation. The presented approach is based on Kalman Filters and suitable for real-time operation. Test results show that a correct and robust association between endpoints and camera-detected tracks is achieved and that occurring identity switches can be resolved.

We study the problem of classifying images into a given, pre-determined taxonomy. This task can be elegantly translated into the structured learning framework. However, despite its power, structured learning has known limits in scalability due to its high memory requirements and slow training process. We propose an efficient approximation of the structured learning approach by an ensemble of local support vector machines (SVMs) that can be trained efficiently with standard techniques. A first theoretical discussion and experiments on toy-data allow to shed light onto why taxonomy-based classification can outperform taxonomy-free approaches and why an appropriately combined ensemble of local SVMs might be of high practical use. Further empirical results on subsets of Caltech256 and VOC2006 data indeed show that our local SVM formulation can effectively exploit the taxonomy structure and thus outperforms standard multi-class classification algorithms while it achieves on par results with taxonomy-based structured algorithms at a significantly decreased computing time.

Automatic annotation of images is a challenging task in computer vision because of “semantic gap” between highlevel visual concepts and image appearances. Therefore, user tags attached to images can provide further information to bridge the gap, even though they are partially uninformative and misleading. In this work, we investigate multi-modal visual concept classification based on visual features and user tags via kernel-based classifiers. An issue here is how to construct kernels between sets of tags. We deploy Markov random walks on graphs of key tags to incorporate co-occurrence between them. This procedure acts as a smoothing of tag based features. Our experimental result on the ImageCLEF2010 PhotoAnnotation benchmark shows that our proposed method outperforms the baseline relying solely on visual information and a recently published state-of-the-art approach.

The quality of visual vocabularies is crucial for the performance of bag-of-words image classification methods. Several approaches have been developed for codebook construction, the most popular method is to cluster a set of image features (e.g. SIFT) by k-means. In this paper, we propose a two-step procedure which incorporates label information into the clustering process by efficiently generating a large and informative vocabulary using class-wise k-means and reducing its size by agglomerative information bottleneck (AIB). We introduce an extension of the AIB procedure for multi-label problems and show that this two-step approach improves the classification results while reducing computation time compared to the vanilla k-means. We analyse the reasons for the performance gain on the PASCAL VOC 2007 data set.

In recent years bag-of-visual-words representations have gained increasing popularity in the field of image classification. Their performance highly relies on creating a good visual vocabulary from a set of image features (e.g. SIFT). For real-world photo archives such as Flicker, codebooks with larger than a few thousand words are desirable, which is infeasible by the standard k-means clustering. In this paper, we propose a two-step procedure which can generate more informative codebooks efficiently by class-wise k-means and a novel procedure for word selection. Our approach was compared favorably to the standard k-means procedure on the PASCAL VOC data sets.