医学图像的准确分类对现代诊断至关重要。深度学习的进步促使临床医生越来越多地使用复杂模型来做出更快、更准确的决策，有时甚至取代人类判断。然而，模型开发成本高昂且重复。神经架构搜索（NAS）通过自动化设计深度学习架构提供了解决方案。本文提出 ZO-DARTS+，这是一种可微 NAS 算法，通过一种利用双层优化生成稀疏概率的新颖方法提高搜索效率。在五个公开医学数据集上的实验表明，ZO-DARTS+ 的准确率与最先进解决方案相当，同时将搜索时间最多缩短三倍。
英文摘要：
Accurate classification of medical images is essential for modern diagnostics. Deep learning advancements led clinicians to increasingly use sophisticated models to make faster and more accurate decisions, sometimes replacing human judgment. However, model development is costly and repetitive. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) provides solutions by automating the design of deep learning architectures. This paper presents ZO-DARTS+, a differentiable NAS algorithm that improves search efficiency through a novel method of generating sparse probabilities by bi-level optimization. Experiments on five public medical datasets show that ZO-DARTS+ matches the accuracy of state-of-the-art solutions while reducing search times by up to three times.
Less is More: AMBER-AFNO -- a New Benchmark for Lightweight 3D Medical Image Segmentation
Department of Physics E. Pancini, University of Naples Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学物理系）；Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology (DIETI), University of Naples Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学电气工程与信息技术系）
LUCF-Net: Lightweight U-shaped Cascade Fusion Network for Medical Image Segmentation
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；International Joint Research Laboratory for Autonomous Robotic Systems（自主机器人系统国际联合研究实验室）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；University of Miami（迈阿密大学）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；The Fourth Affiliated Hospital Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院附属第四医院）
Recent advances have been made in applying convolutional neural networks to achieve more precise prediction results for medical image segmentation problems. However, the success of existing methods has highly relied on huge computational complexity and massive storage, which is impractical in the real-world scenario. To deal with this problem, we propose an efficient architecture by distilling knowledge from well-trained medical image segmentation networks to train another lightweight network. This architecture empowers the lightweight network to get a significant improvement on segmentation c…
EEG Emotion Copilot: Optimizing Lightweight LLMs for Emotional EEG Interpretation with Assisted Medical Record Generation
Laboratory of Digital Image and Intelligent Computation, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China（数字图像与智能计算实验室，上海 Maritime 大学）；Department of Neurology, Affiliated Lianyungang Hospital of Xuzhou Medical University, Lianyungang 222002, China（神经内科，徐州医学院附属连云港医院）；Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, SAR, China（中文学与双语研究部，香港理工大学）
Land-cover classification has long been a hot and difficult challenge in remote sensing community. With massive High-resolution Remote Sensing (HRS) images available, manually and automatically designed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have already shown their great latent capacity on HRS land-cover classification in recent years. Especially, the former can achieve better performance while the latter is able to generate lightweight architecture. Unfortunately, they both have shortcomings. On the one hand, because manual CNNs are almost proposed for natural image processing, it becomes very…
Tencent（腾讯）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）
Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) tasks have achieved significant performance with deep neural networks. However, the large number of parameters in CNN-based met-hods for SISR tasks require heavy computations. Although several efficient SISR models have been recently proposed, most are handcrafted and thus lack flexibility. In this work, we propose a novel differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach on both the cell-level and network-level to search for lightweight SISR models. Specifically, the cell-level search space is designed based on an information distillation mechanism,…
Neural Architecture Search (NAS), a framework which automates the task of designing neural networks, has recently been actively studied in the field of deep learning. However, there are only a few NAS methods suitable for 3D medical image segmentation. Medical 3D images are generally very large; thus it is difficult to apply previous NAS methods due to their GPU computational burden and long training time. We propose the resource-optimized neural architecture search method which can be applied to 3D medical segmentation tasks in a short training time (1.39 days for 1GB dataset) using a small a…
Deep convolutional neural networks demonstrate impressive results in the super-resolution domain. A series of studies concentrate on improving peak signal noise ratio (PSNR) by using much deeper layers, which are not friendly to constrained resources. Pursuing a trade-off between the restoration capacity and the simplicity of models is still non-trivial. Recent contributions are struggling to manually maximize this balance, while our work achieves the same goal automatically with neural architecture search. Specifically, we handle super-resolution with a multi-objective approach. We also propo…
University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；Czech Technical University（捷克理工大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）
This paper presents a novel neural architecture search method, called LiDNAS, for generating lightweight monocular depth estimation models. Unlike previous neural architecture search (NAS) approaches, where finding optimized networks are computationally highly demanding, the introduced novel Assisted Tabu Search leads to efficient architecture exploration. Moreover, we construct the search space on a pre-defined backbone network to balance layer diversity and search space size. The LiDNAS method outperforms the state-of-the-art NAS approach, proposed for disparity and depth estimation, in term…
Kakao Brain；Seoul National University（首尔大学）；MILA, Université de Montréal（MILA，蒙特利尔大学）
In this paper, a neural architecture search (NAS) framework is proposed for 3D medical image segmentation, to automatically optimize a neural architecture from a large design space. Our NAS framework searches the structure of each layer including neural connectivities and operation types in both of the encoder and decoder. Since optimizing over a large discrete architecture space is difficult due to high-resolution 3D medical images, a novel stochastic sampling algorithm based on a continuous relaxation is also proposed for scalable gradient based optimization. On the 3D medical image segmenta…
Benefiting from the search efficiency, differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) has evolved as the most dominant alternative to automatically design competitive deep neural networks (DNNs). We note that DNNs must be executed under strictly hard performance constraints in real-world scenarios, for example, the runtime latency on autonomous vehicles. However, to obtain the architecture that meets the given performance constraint, previous hardware-aware differentiable NAS methods have to repeat a plethora of search runs to manually tune the hyper-parameters by trial and error, and thus th…
The fundamental problem in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is to efficiently find high-performing architectures from a given search space. We propose a simple but powerful method which we call FEAR, for ranking architectures in any search space. FEAR leverages the viewpoint that neural networks are powerful non-linear feature extractors. First, we train different architectures in the search space to the same training or validation error. Then, we compare the usefulness of the features extracted by each architecture. We do so with a quick training keeping most of the architecture frozen. This …
3D convolution neural networks (CNN) have been proved very successful in parsing organs or tumours in 3D medical images, but it remains sophisticated and time-consuming to choose or design proper 3D networks given different task contexts. Recently, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is proposed to solve this problem by searching for the best network architecture automatically. However, the inconsistency between search stage and deployment stage often exists in NAS algorithms due to memory constraints and large search space, which could become more serious when applying NAS to some memory and tim…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Microsoft Azure Speech（微软Azure语音）
Text to speech (TTS) has been broadly used to synthesize natural and intelligible speech in different scenarios. Deploying TTS in various end devices such as mobile phones or embedded devices requires extremely small memory usage and inference latency. While non-autoregressive TTS models such as FastSpeech have achieved significantly faster inference speed than autoregressive models, their model size and inference latency are still large for the deployment in resource constrained devices. In this paper, we propose LightSpeech, which leverages neural architecture search~(NAS) to automatically d…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
The search space of neural architecture search (NAS) for convolutional neural network (CNN) is huge. To reduce searching cost, most NAS algorithms use fixed outer network level structure, and search the repeatable cell structure only. Such kind of fixed architecture performs well when enough cells and channels are used. However, when the architecture becomes more lightweight, the performance decreases significantly. To obtain better lightweight architectures, more flexible and diversified neural architectures are in demand, and more efficient methods should be designed for larger search space.…
University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Czech Technical University（捷克技术大学）
We present LDP, a lightweight dense prediction neural architecture search (NAS) framework. Starting from a pre-defined generic backbone, LDP applies the novel Assisted Tabu Search for efficient architecture exploration. LDP is fast and suitable for various dense estimation problems, unlike previous NAS methods that are either computational demanding or deployed only for a single subtask. The performance of LPD is evaluated on monocular depth estimation, semantic segmentation, and image super-resolution tasks on diverse datasets, including NYU-Depth-v2, KITTI, Cityscapes, COCO-stuff, DIV2K, Set…
Southeast University（东南大学）；Southeast University Shenzhen Research Institute（东南大学深圳研究院）
Nowadays, the rapid development of photovoltaic(PV) power stations requires increasingly reliable maintenance and fault diagnosis of PV modules in the field. Due to the effectiveness, convolutional neural network (CNN) has been widely used in the existing automatic defect detection of PV cells. However, the parameters of these CNN-based models are very large, which require stringent hardware resources and it is difficult to be applied in actual industrial projects. To solve these problems, we propose a novel lightweight high-performance model for automatic defect detection of PV cells in elect…
Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica（荷兰国家数学与计算机科学研究所）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Leiden University Medical Center（莱顿大学医学中心）
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have the potential for making various clinical procedures more time-efficient by automating medical image segmentation. Due to their strong, in some cases human-level, performance, they have become the standard approach in this field. The design of the best possible medical image segmentation DNNs, however, is task-specific. Neural Architecture Search (NAS), i.e., the automation of neural network design, has been shown to have the capability to outperform manually designed networks for various tasks. However, the existing NAS methods for medical image segmentation h…
We present MedMNIST, a collection of 10 pre-processed medical open datasets. MedMNIST is standardized to perform classification tasks on lightweight 28x28 images, which requires no background knowledge. Covering the primary data modalities in medical image analysis, it is diverse on data scale (from 100 to 100,000) and tasks (binary/multi-class, ordinal regression and multi-label). MedMNIST could be used for educational purpose, rapid prototyping, multi-modal machine learning or AutoML in medical image analysis. Moreover, MedMNIST Classification Decathlon is designed to benchmark AutoML algori…
ZheJiang University（浙江大学）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）
The recent breakthroughs of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) have motivated various applications in medical image segmentation. However, most existing work either simply rely on hyper-parameter tuning or stick to a fixed network backbone, thereby limiting the underlying search space to identify more efficient architecture. This paper presents a Multi-Scale NAS (MS-NAS) framework that is featured with multi-scale search space from network backbone to cell operation, and multi-scale fusion capability to fuse features with different sizes. To mitigate the computational overhead due to the larger …
Deep learning algorithms, in particular 2D and 3D fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs), have rapidly become the mainstream methodology for volumetric medical image segmentation. However, 2D convolutions cannot fully leverage the rich spatial information along the third axis, while 3D convolutions suffer from the demanding computation and high GPU memory consumption. In this paper, we propose to automatically search the network architecture tailoring to volumetric medical image segmentation problem. Concretely, we formulate the structure learning as differentiable neural architecture sear…
ReCo-KD: Region- and Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation
McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston)（麦威廉生物医学信息学学院，德克萨斯大学健康科学中心休斯顿分校（UTHealth休斯顿））
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Bytedance Inc.（字节跳动公司）
High-resolution representations (HR) are essential for dense prediction tasks such as segmentation, detection, and pose estimation. Learning HR representations is typically ignored in previous Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods that focus on image classification. This work proposes a novel NAS method, called HR-NAS, which is able to find efficient and accurate networks for different tasks, by effectively encoding multiscale contextual information while maintaining high-resolution representations. In HR-NAS, we renovate the NAS search space as well as its searching strategy. To better enc…
Embedding Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) into edge devices for inference is a very challenging task because such lightweight hardware is not born to handle this heavyweight software, which is the common overhead from the modern state-of-the-art CNN models. In this paper, targeting at reducing the overhead with trading the accuracy as less as possible, we propose a novel of Network Candidate Search (NCS), an alternative way to study the trade-off between the resource usage and the performance through grouping concepts and elimination tournament. Besides, NCS can also be generalized across a…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所）；Mathematical and Applied Visual Computing, TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学数学与应用视觉计算）
Deep neural networks have rapidly become the mainstream method for face recognition (FR). However, this limits the deployment of such models that contain an extremely large number of parameters to embedded and low-end devices. In this work, we present an extremely lightweight and accurate FR solution, namely PocketNet. We utilize neural architecture search to develop a new family of lightweight face-specific architectures. We additionally propose a novel training paradigm based on knowledge distillation (KD), the multi-step KD, where the knowledge is distilled from the teacher model to the stu…
ByteDance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Non-Local (NL) blocks have been widely studied in various vision tasks. However, it has been rarely explored to embed the NL blocks in mobile neural networks, mainly due to the following challenges: 1) NL blocks generally have heavy computation cost which makes it difficult to be applied in applications where computational resources are limited, and 2) it is an open problem to discover an optimal configuration to embed NL blocks into mobile neural networks. We propose AutoNL to overcome the above two obstacles. Firstly, we propose a Lightweight Non-Local (LightNL) block by squeezing the transf…
Institute of Medical Technology, Hamburg University of Technology（汉堡工业大学医学技术研究所）
Typically, deep learning architectures are handcrafted for their respective learning problem. As an alternative, neural architecture search (NAS) has been proposed where the architecture's structure is learned in an additional optimization step. For the medical imaging domain, this approach is very promising as there are diverse problems and imaging modalities that require architecture design. However, NAS is very time-consuming and medical learning problems often involve high-dimensional data with high computational requirements. We propose an efficient approach for NAS in the context of medi…
SliceMamba with Neural Architecture Search for Medical Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学计算机科学学院）；Xiaomi Inc（小米公司）；Department of Radiology, Capital Medical University Affiliated Beijing Friendship Hospital（首都医科大学附属北京友谊医院放射科）；New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别新实验室）
DAUNet: A Lightweight UNet Variant with Deformable Convolutions and Parameter-Free Attention for Medical Image Segmentation
Department of Electrical Engineering (ISY), Information Coding (ICG), Linköping University（电气工程系（ISY）、信息编码系（ICG）、利厄普大学）；SDAIA-KFUPM Joint Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals（SDAIA-KFUPM人工智能联合研究中心、国王法赫德石油大学）；Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computing and Mathematics, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals（计算机工程系、计算与数学学院、国王法赫德石油大学）
Duke University（杜克大学）；Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）
Lesion detection in digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) is an important and a challenging problem characterized by a low prevalence of images containing tumors. Due to the label scarcity problem, large deep learning models and computationally intensive algorithms are likely to fail when applied to this task. In this paper, we present a practical yet lightweight backbone to improve the accuracy of tumor detection. Specifically, we propose a novel modification of visual transformer (ViT) on image feature patches to connect the feature patches of a tumor with healthy backgrounds of breast images a…
LV-UNet: A Lightweight and Vanilla Model for Medical Image Segmentation
College of Control Science and Engineering（控制科学与工程学院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；College of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；The First Clinical Medical College（第一临床医学院）；Guangdong Medical University（广东医科大学）
BiSe-Unet: A Lightweight Dual-path U-Net with Attention-refined Context for Real-time Medical Image Segmentation
Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Central Florida（佛罗里达中央大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Medicine, University of Central Florida College of Medicine（佛罗里达中央大学医学院医学系）
MedFG-VQA: Low-Frequency Memory and Graph Attention for Lightweight Medical VQA
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing of Advanced Construction Machinery（高端工程机械智能制造国家重点实验室）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University（成均馆大学电气与计算机工程系）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Ritsumeikan University（立命馆大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Dalian university of technology（大连理工大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）
Deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) techniques have generally achieved excellent performance in the computer vision field. Recently, it has been proven that three-dimensional (3D) SR for medical volumetric data delivers better visual results than conventional two-dimensional (2D) processing. However, deepening and widening 3D networks increases training difficulty significantly due to the large number of parameters and small number of training samples. Thus, we propose a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) for SR of medical volumetric data called ParallelNet using parallel connections.…
LightM-UNet: Mamba Assists in Lightweight UNet for Medical Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学人工智能研究院）；Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education（教育部高可信软件技术重点实验室）；National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering, Peking University（北京大学国家软件工程研究中心）
