Ismail Ben Ayed

École de Technologie Supérieure · Département de génie de la production automatisée

With the recent raise of foundation models in computer vision and NLP, the pretrain-and-adapt strategy, where a large-scale model is fine-tuned on downstream tasks, is gaining popularity. However, traditional fine-tuning approaches may still require significant resources and yield sub-optimal results when the labeled data of the target task is scar...

Ensuring reliable confidence scores from deep networks is of pivotal importance in critical decision-making systems, notably in the medical domain. While recent literature on calibrating deep segmentation networks has led to significant progress, their uncertainty is usually modeled by leveraging the information of individual pixels, which disregar...

Foundation vision-language models are currently transforming computer vision, and are on the rise in medical imaging fueled by their very promising generalization capabilities. However, the initial attempts to transfer this new paradigm to medical imaging have shown less impressive performances than those observed in other domains, due to the signi...

Training a deep learning model to classify histopathological images is challenging, because of the color and shape variability of the cells and tissues, and the reduced amount of available data, which does not allow proper learning of those variations. Variations can come from the image acquisition process, for example, due to different cell staini...

Recently, CLIP-based approaches have exhibited remarkable performance on generalization and few-shot learning tasks, fueled by the power of contrastive language-vision pre-training. In particular, prompt tuning has emerged as an effective strategy to adapt the pre-trained language-vision models to downstream tasks by employing task-related textual...

We introduce a simple non-linear embedding adaptation layer, which is fine-tuned on top of fixed pre-trained features for one-shot tasks, improving significantly transductive entropy-based inference for low-shot regimes. Our norm-induced transformation could be understood as a re-parametrization of the feature space to disentangle the representatio...

Despite the undeniable progress in visual recognition tasks fueled by deep neural networks, there exists recent evidence showing that these models are poorly calibrated, resulting in over-confident predictions. The standard practices of minimizing the cross-entropy loss during training promote the predicted softmax probabilities to match the one-ho...

With the recent raise of foundation models in computer vision and NLP, the pretrain-and-adapt strategy, where a large-scale model is fine-tuned on downstream tasks, is gaining popularity. However, traditional fine-tuning approaches may still require significant resources and yield sub-optimal results when the labeled data of the target task is scar...

Standard deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) lack the ability of generalizing to domains which have not been seen during training. This problem is mainly due to the common but often wrong assumption of such models that the source and target data come from the same i.i.d. distribution. Recently, Vision Transformers (ViT...

Weakly supervised video object localization (WSVOL) methods often rely on visual and motion cues only, making them susceptible to inaccurate localization. Recently, discriminative models have been explored using a temporal class activation mapping (CAM) method. Although their results are promising, objects are assumed to have limited movement from...

Ensuring reliable confidence scores from deep networks is of pivotal importance in critical decision-making systems, notably in the medical domain. While recent literature on calibrating deep segmentation networks has led to significant progress, their uncertainty is usually modeled by leveraging the information of individual pixels, which disregar...

Using state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) models to diagnose cancer from histology data presents several challenges related to the nature and availability of labeled histology images, including image size, stain variations, and label ambiguity. In addition, cancer grading and the localization of regions of interest (ROIs) in such images normally re...

Video-based re-identification (ReID) has recently drawn much attention due to advances with deep learning (DL) and modern computational infrastructure. Despite recent success with CNN architectures, state-of-the-art approaches for video-based ReID have failed to leverage temporal information due to redundancy among frames, misalignment of ROIs acro...

We tackle the Few-Shot Open-Set Recognition (FSOSR) problem, i.e. classifying instances among a set of classes for which we only have a few labeled samples, while simultaneously detecting instances that do not belong to any known class. We explore the popular transductive setting, which leverages the unlabelled query instances at inference. Motivat...

Weakly supervised video object localization (WSVOL) allows locating object in videos using only global video tags such as object classes. State-of-art methods rely on multiple independent stages, where initial spatio-temporal proposals are generated using visual and motion cues, and then prominent objects are identified and refined. The localizatio...

We address interactive panoptic annotation, where one segment all object and stuff regions in an image. We investigate two graph-based segmentation algorithms that both enforce connectivity of each region, with a notable class-aware Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation that ensures global optimum. Both algorithms can take RGB, or utilize th...

We introduce an information-maximization approach for the Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) problem. Specifically, we explore a parametric family of loss functions evaluating the mutual information between the features and the labels, and find automatically the one that maximizes the predictive performances. Furthermore, we introduce the Elbow M...

Recent studies have revealed that, beyond conventional accuracy, calibration should also be considered for training modern deep neural networks. To address miscalibration during learning, some methods have explored different penalty functions as part of the learning objective, alongside a standard classification loss, with a hyper-parameter control...

This paper introduces a generalized few-shot segmentation framework with a straightforward training process and an easy-to-optimize inference phase. In particular, we propose a simple yet effective model based on the well-known InfoMax principle, where the Mutual Information (MI) between the learned feature representations and their corresponding p...

Despite achieving promising results in a breadth of medical image segmentation tasks, deep neural networks (DNNs) require large training datasets with pixel-wise annotations. Obtaining these curated datasets is a cumbersome process which limits the applicability of DNNs in scenarios where annotated images are scarce. Mixed supervision is an appeali...

Standard few-shot benchmarks are often built upon simplifying assumptions on the query sets, which may not always hold in practice. In particular, for each task at testing time, the classes effectively present in the unlabeled query set are known a priori, and correspond exactly to the set of classes represented in the labeled support set. We relax...

A major problem of deep neural networks for image classification is their vulnerability to domain changes at test-time. Recent methods have proposed to address this problem with test-time training (TTT), where a two-branch model is trained to learn a main classification task and also a self-supervised task used to perform test-time adaptation. Howe...

Supervised learning is well-known to fail at generalization under distribution shifts. In typical clinical settings, the source data is inaccessible and the target distribution is represented with a handful of samples: adaptation can only happen at test time on a few (or even a single) subject(s). We investigate test-time single-subject adaptation...

Despite the undeniable progress in visual recognition tasks fueled by deep neural networks, there exists recent evidence showing that these models are poorly calibrated, resulting in over-confident predictions. The standard practices of minimizing the cross entropy loss during training promote the predicted softmax probabilities to match the one-ho...

Weakly supervised video object localization (WSVOL) allows locating object in videos using only global video tags such as object class. State-of-art methods rely on multiple independent stages, where initial spatio-temporal proposals are generated using visual and motion cues, then prominent objects are identified and refined. Localization is done...

Domain adaptation (DA) has drawn high interest for its capacity to adapt a model trained on labeled source data to perform well on unlabeled or weakly labeled target data from a different domain. Most common DA techniques require concurrent access to the input images of both the source and target domains. However, in practice, privacy concerns ofte...

We explore clustering the softmax predictions of deep neural networks and introduce a novel probabilistic clustering method, referred to as k-sBetas. In the general context of clustering distributions, the existing methods focused on exploring distortion measures tailored to simplex data, such as the KL divergence, as alternatives to the standard E...

We tackle the Few-Shot Open-Set Recognition (FSOSR) problem, i.e. classifying instances among a set of classes for which we only have few labeled samples, while simultaneously detecting instances that do not belong to any known class. Departing from existing literature, we focus on developing model-agnostic inference methods that can be plugged int...

Classification has been the focal point of research on adversarial attacks, but only a few works investigate methods suited to denser prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation. The methods proposed in these works do not accurately solve the adversarial segmentation problem and, therefore, are overoptimistic in terms of size of the perturbatio...

Few-shot learning has recently attracted wide interest in image classification, but almost all the current public benchmarks are focused on natural images. The few-shot paradigm is highly relevant in medical-imaging applications due to the scarcity of labeled data, as annotations are expensive and require specialized expertise. However, in medical...

Supervised learning is well-known to fail at generalization under distribution shifts. In typical clinical settings, the source data is inaccessible and the target distribution is represented with a handful of samples: adaptation can only happen at test time on a few or even a single subject(s). We investigate test-time single-subject adaptation fo...

Trained using only image class label, deep weakly supervised methods allow image classification and ROI segmentation for interpretability. Despite their success on natural images, they face several challenges over histology data where ROI are visually similar to background making models vulnerable to high pixel-wise false positives. These methods l...

Adversarial robustness has become a topic of growing interest in machine learning since it was observed that neural networks tend to be brittle. We propose an information-geometric formulation of adversarial defense and introduce Fire , a new Fisher-Rao regularization for the categorical cross-entropy loss, which is based on the geodesic distance...

Trained using only image class label, deep weakly supervised methods allow image classification and ROI segmentation for interpretability. Despite their success on natural images, they face several challenges over histology data where ROI are visually similar to background making models vulnerable to high pixel-wise false positives. These methods l...

Transductive inference is widely used in few-shot learning, as it leverages the statistics of the unlabeled query set of a few-shot task, typically yielding substantially better performances than its inductive counterpart. The current few-shot benchmarks use perfectly class-balanced tasks at inference. We argue that such an artificial regularity is...

The segmentation of retinal vasculature from eye fundus images is a fundamental task in retinal image analysis. Over recent years, increasingly complex approaches based on sophisticated Convolutional Neural Network architectures have been pushing performance on well-established benchmark datasets. In this paper, we take a step back and analyze the...

Using only global image-class labels, weakly-supervised learning methods, such as class activation mapping, allow training CNNs to jointly classify an image, and locate regions of interest associated with the predicted class. However, without any guidance at the pixel level, such methods may yield inaccurate regions. This problem is known to be mor...

Training state-of-the-art vision models has become prohibitively expensive for researchers and practitioners. For the sake of accessibility and resource reuse, it is important to focus on adapting these models to a variety of downstream scenarios. An interesting and practical paradigm is online test-time adaptation, according to which training data...

Using only global annotations such as the image class labels, weakly-supervised learning methods allow CNN classifiers to jointly classify an image, and yield the regions of interest associated with the predicted class. However, without any guidance at the pixel level, such methods may yield inaccurate regions. This problem is known to be more chal...

Using only global annotations such as the image class labels, weakly-supervised learning methods allow CNN classifiers to jointly classify an image, and yield the regions of interest associated with the predicted class. However, without any guidance at the pixel level, such methods may yield inaccurate regions. This problem is known to be more chal...

Class Activation Mapping (CAM) methods have recently gained much attention for weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) tasks. They allow for CNN visualization and interpretation without training on fully annotated image datasets. CAM methods are typically integrated within off-the-shelf CNN backbones, such as ResNet50. Due to convolution and p...

In spite of the dominant performances of deep neural networks, recent works have shown that they are poorly calibrated, resulting in over-confident predictions. Miscalibration can be exacerbated by overfitting due to the minimization of the cross-entropy during training, as it promotes the predicted softmax probabilities to match the one-hot label...

Weakly-supervised learning (WSL) has recently triggered substantial interest as it mitigates the lack of pixel-wise annotations. Given global image labels, WSL methods yield pixel-level predictions (segmentations), which enable to interpret class predictions. Despite their recent success, mostly with natural images, such methods can face important...

Automatic medical image segmentation plays a critical role in scientific research and medical care. Existing high-performance deep learning methods typically rely on large training datasets with high-quality manual annotations, which are difficult to obtain in many clinical applications. Here, we introduce Annotation-effIcient Deep lEarning (AIDE),...

Despite achieving promising results in a breadth of medical image segmentation tasks, deep neural networks require large training datasets with pixel-wise annotations. Obtaining these curated datasets is a cumbersome process which limits the application in scenarios where annotated images are scarce. Mixed supervision is an appealing alternative fo...

Class Activation Mapping (CAM) methods have recently gained much attention for weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) tasks. They allow for CNN visualization and interpretation without training on fully annotated image datasets. CAM methods are typically integrated within off-the-shelf CNN backbones, such as ResNet50. Due to convolution and p...

Domain adaptation (DA) has drawn high interest for its capacity to adapt a model trained on labeled source data to perform well on unlabeled or weakly labeled target data from a different domain. Most common DA techniques require concurrent access to the input images of both the source and target domains. However, in practice, privacy concerns ofte...

For some typical and widely used non-convex half-quadratic regularization models and the Ambrosio-Tortorelli approximate Mumford-Shah model, based on the Kurdyka-\L ojasiewicz analysis and the recent nonconvex proximal algorithms, we developed an efficient preconditioned framework aiming at the linear subproblems that appeared in the nonlinear alte...

Person Re-Identification (ReID) is a challenging problem in many video analytics and surveillance applications, where a person's identity must be associated across a distributed non-overlapping network of cameras. Video-based person ReID has recently gained much interest given the potential for capturing discriminant spatio-temporal information fro...

Recent years have witnessed a substantial increase in the deep learning (DL) architectures proposed for visual recognition tasks like person re-identification, where individuals must be recognized over multiple distributed cameras. Although these architectures have greatly improved the state-of-the-art accuracy, the computational complexity of the...

We introduce Transductive Infomation Maximization (TIM) for few-shot learning. Our method maximizes the mutual information between the query features and their label predictions for a given few-shot task, in conjunction with a supervision loss based on the support set. We motivate our transductive loss by deriving a formal relation between the clas...

We investigate a general formulation for clustering and transductive few-shot learning, which integrates prototype-based objectives, Laplacian regularization and supervision constraints from a few labeled data points. We propose a concave-convex relaxation of the problem, and derive a computationally efficient block-coordinate bound optimizer, with...

Deep neural networks have achieved promising results in a breadth of medical image segmentation tasks. Nevertheless, they require large training datasets with pixel-wise segmentations, which are expensive to obtain in practice. Mixed supervision could mitigate this difficulty, with a small fraction of the data containing complete pixel-wise annotat...

Adversarial robustness has become a topic of growing interest in machine learning since it was observed that neural networks tend to be brittle. We propose an information-geometric formulation of adversarial defense and introduce FIRE, a new Fisher-Rao regularization for the categorical cross-entropy loss, which is based on the geodesic distance be...