Publications

Publications organized by journals, conferences (peer-reviewed) and preprints. (NOTE: under construction, see /publications)

Sikaroudi, M. et al., Accepted. Offline versus Online Triplet Mining based on Extreme Distances of Histopathology Patches. In International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Computer Vision (ISCV 2020) . Fez-Morrocco (virtual): IEEE., p. 8. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.02200. Preprint
See also: dimensionality reduction, Manifold Learning, Digital Pathology, Conferences, Highlighted Papers
Abstract
2007.02200.pdf
We analyze the effect of offline and online triplet mining for colorectal cancer (CRC) histopathology dataset containing 100,000 patches. We consider the extreme, i.e., farthest and nearest patches with respect to a given anchor, both in online and offline mining. While many works focus solely on how to select the triplets online (batch-wise), we also study the effect of extreme distances and neighbor patches before training in an offline fashion. We analyze the impacts of extreme cases for offline versus online mining, including easy positive, batch semi-hard, and batch hard triplet mining as well as the neighborhood component analysis loss, its proxy version, and distance weighted sampling. We also investigate online approaches based on extreme distance and comprehensively compare the performance of offline and online mining based on the data patterns and explain offline mining as a tractable generalization of the online mining with large mini-batch size. As well, we discuss the relations of different colorectal tissue types in terms of extreme distances. We found that offline mining can generate a better statistical representation of the population by working on the whole dataset.
See also: Deep Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning, Forest Fires, Prediction, Classification, Forest Fire Prediction and Control, Journal Papers, Highlighted Papers
Abstract
mltree.pdf
papers2.pdf
papers1.pdf
Final Published Version
Artificial intelligence has been applied in wildfire science and management since the 1990s, with early applications including neural networks and expert systems. Since then the field has rapidly progressed congruently with the wide adoption of machine learning (ML) methods in the environmental sciences. Here, we present a scoping review of ML applications in wildfire science and management. Our overall objective is to improve awareness of ML methods among wildfire researchers and managers, as well as illustrate the diverse and challenging range of problems in wildfire science available to ML data scientists. To that end, we first present an overview of popular ML approaches used in wildfire science to date, and then review the use of ML in wildfire science as broadly categorized into six problem domains, including: 1) fuels characterization, fire detection, and mapping; 2) fire weather and climate change; 3) fire occurrence, susceptibility, and risk; 4) fire behavior prediction; 5) fire effects; and 6) fire management. Furthermore, we discuss the advantages and limitations of various ML approaches relating to data size, computational requirements, generalizability, and interpretability, as well as identify opportunities for future advances in the science and management of wildfires within a data science context. In total, we identfied 300 relevant publications up to the end of 2019, where the most frequently used ML methods across problem domains included random forests, MaxEnt, artificial neural networks, decision trees, support vector machines, and genetic algorithms. As such, there exists opportunities to apply more current ML methods — including deep learning and agent based learning — in the wildfire sciences, especially in instances involving very large multivariate datasets. We must recognize, however, that despite the ability of ML methods to learn on their own, expertise in wildfire science is necessary to ensure realistic modelling of fire processes across multiple scales, while the complexity of some ML methods, such as deep learning, requires a dedicated and sophisticated knowledge of their application. Finally, we stress that the wildfire research and management communities play an active role in providing relevant, high quality, and freely available wildfire data for use by practitioners of ML methods.
Ma, H. et al., 2020. Isolation Mondrian Forest for Batch and Online Anomaly Detection. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) 2020. Available at: arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.03692. Also available at:
See also: Tree-based Learning, Anomaly Detection, Anomaly Detection, Conferences, Highlighted Papers
Abstract
imondrian.pdf

We propose a new method, named isolation Mon- drian forest (iMondrian forest), for batch and online anomaly detection. The proposed method is a novel hybrid of isolation forest and Mondrian forest which are existing methods for batch anomaly detection and online random forest, respectively. iMondrian forest takes the idea of isolation, using the depth of a node in a tree, and implements it in the Mondrian forest structure. The result is a new data structure which can accept streaming data in an online manner while being used for anomaly detection. Our experiments show that iMondrian forest mostly performs better than isolation forest in batch settings and has better or comparable performance against other batch and online anomaly detection methods.

Akgun, S.Alperen et al., 2020. Using Emotions to Complement Multi-Modal Human-Robot Interaction in Urban Search and Rescue Scenarios. In 22nd International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI-2020). October. Utrecht, the Netherlands, p. 9.
See also: Conferences
Abstract
In this study, we investigated if there is consensus in using emotions as an additional communication channel to support multi-modal Human-Robot Interactions (HRI) in urban search and rescue scenarios, in which effectiveness of interactions is the key to success. The natural mappings between specific situations that might happen during missions and the proper emotions for the robots to show in that situation were obtained through a Mturk study with 78 participants. Suggested mappings for a set of 10 common situations were provided, which can be used to improve HRI in urban search and rescue situations.
Sikaroudi, M. et al., 2020. Supervision and Source Domain Impact on Representation Learning: A Histopathology Case Study. In International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC'20). 42nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC'20): IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Available at: https://embs.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/rtf/EMBC20_ContentListWeb_1.html#moat2-15_02. Conference Description
See also: Deep Neural Networks, Medical Image Analysis, Digital Pathology, Conferences, Highlighted Papers
Abstract
2005.08629.pdf

As many algorithms depend on a suitable representation of data, learning unique features is considered a crucial task. Although supervised techniques using deep neural networks have boosted the performance of representation learning, the need for a large set of labeled data limits the application of such methods. As an example, high-quality delineations of regions of interest in the field of pathology is a tedious and time-consuming task due to the large image dimensions. In this work, we explored the performance of a deep neural network and triplet loss in the area of representation learning. We investigated the notion of similarity and dissimilarity in pathology whole-slide images and compared different setups from unsupervised and semi-supervised to supervised learning in our experiments. Additionally, different approaches were tested, applying few-shot learning on two publicly available pathology image datasets. We achieved high accuracy and generalization when the learned representations were applied to two different pathology datasets.
 

 

See also: Conferences
Abstract
Mean field theory provides an effective way of scaling multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms to environments with many agents that can be abstracted by a virtual mean agent. In this paper, we extend mean field multiagent algorithms to multiple types. The types enable the relaxation of a core assumption in mean field games, which is that all agents in the environment are playing almost similar strategies and have the same goal. We conduct experiments on three different testbeds for the field of many agent reinforcement learning, based on the standard MAgents framework. We consider two different kinds of mean field games: a) Games where agents belong to predefined types that are known a priori and b) Games where the type of each agent is unknown and therefore must be learned based on observations. We introduce new algorithms for each type of game and demonstrate their superior performance over state of the art algorithms that assume that all agents belong to the same type and other baseline algorithms in the MAgent framework
Ghojogh, B., Karray, F. & Crowley, M., 2020. Generalized Subspace Learning by Roweis Discriminant Analysis. In International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition. Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal (virtual): Springer. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1910.05437. Publisher's Version
See also: Conferences
Abstract
We present a new method which generalizes subspace learning based on eigenvalue and generalized eigenvalue problems. This method, Roweis Discriminant Analysis (RDA), is named after Sam Roweis to whom the field of subspace learning owes significantly. RDA is a family of infinite number of algorithms where Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Supervised PCA (SPCA), and Fisher Discriminant Analysis (FDA) are special cases. One of the extreme special cases, which we name Double Supervised Discriminant Analysis (DSDA), uses the labels twice; it is novel and has not appeared elsewhere. We propose a dual for RDA for some special cases. We also propose kernel RDA, generalizing kernel PCA, kernel SPCA, and kernel FDA, using both dual RDA and representation theory. Our theoretical analysis explains previously known facts such as why SPCA can use regression but FDA cannot, why PCA and SPCA have duals but FDA does not, why kernel PCA and kernel SPCA use kernel trick but kernel FDA does not, and why PCA is the best linear method for reconstruction. Roweisfaces and kernel Roweisfaces are also proposed generalizing eigenfaces, Fisherfaces, supervised eigenfaces, and their kernel variants. We also report experiments showing the effectiveness of RDA and kernel RDA on some benchmark datasets.
Bhalla, S., Subramanian, S.Ganapathi & Crowley, M., 2020. Deep Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving. In Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Spring, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, p. 17.
See also: Conferences
Abstract
deep_multi_agent_reinforcement_learning_for_autonomous_driving-full.pdf

Deep Learning and back-propagation have been successfully used to perform centralized training with communication protocols among multiple agents in a cooperative environment. In this work, we present techniques for centralized training of Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MARL) using the model-free Deep Q-Network (DQN) as the baseline model and communication between agents. We present two novel, scalable and centralized MARL training techniques (MA-MeSN, MA- BoN), which achieve faster convergence and higher cumulative reward in complex domains like autonomous driving simulators. Subsequently, we present a memory module to achieve a decentralized cooperative pol- icy for execution and thus addressing the challenges of noise and com- munication bottlenecks in real-time communication channels. This work theoretically and empirically compares our centralized and decentralized training algorithms to current research in the field of MARL. We also present and release a new OpenAI-Gym environment which can be used for multi-agent research as it simulates multiple autonomous cars driving on a highway. We compare the performance of our centralized algorithms to existing state-of-the-art algorithms, DIAL and IMS based on cumu- lative reward achieved per episode. MA-MeSN and MA-BoN achieve a cumulative reward of at least 263% of the reward achieved by the DIAL and IMS. We also present an ablation study of the scalability of MA- BoN showing that it has a linear time and space complexity compared to quadratic for DIAL in the number of agents.

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