OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Detecting automatically the layout of clinical documents to enhance the performances of downstream natural language processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Objective:Develop and validate an algorithm for analyzing the layout of PDF clinical documents to improve the performance of downstream natural language processing tasks. Materials and Methods: We designed an algorithm to process clinical PDF documents and extract only clinically relevant text. The algorithm consists of several steps: initial text extraction using a PDF parser, followed by classification into categories such as body text, left notes, and footers using a Transformer deep neural network architecture, and finally an aggregation step to compile the lines of a given label in the text. We evaluated the technical performance of the body text extraction algorithm by applying it to a random sample of documents that were annotated. Medical performance was evaluated by examining the extraction of medical concepts of interest from the text in their respective sections. Finally, we tested an end-to-end system on a medical use case of automatic detection of acute infection described in the hospital report. Results:Our algorithm achieved per-line precision, recall, and F1 score of 98.4, 97.0, and 97.7, respectively, for body line extraction. The precision, recall, and F1 score per document for the acute infection detection algorithm were 82.54 (95CI 72.86-91.60), 85.24 (95CI 76.61-93.70), 83.87 (95CI 76, 92-90.08) with exploitation of the results of the advanced body extraction algorithm, respectively. Conclusion:We have developed and validated a system for extracting body text from clinical documents in PDF format by identifying their layout. We were able to demonstrate that this preprocessing allowed us to obtain better performances for a common downstream task, i.e., the extraction of medical concepts in their respective sections, thus proving the interest of this method on a clinical use case.
Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Material Handling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

As one of the core parts of flexible manufacturing systems, material handling involves storage and transportation of materials between workstations with automated vehicles. The improvement in material handling can impulse the overall efficiency of the manufacturing system. However, the occurrence of dynamic events during the optimisation of task arrangements poses a challenge that requires adaptability and effectiveness. In this paper, we aim at the scheduling of automated guided vehicles for dynamic material handling. Motivated by some real-world scenarios, unknown new tasks and unexpected vehicle breakdowns are regarded as dynamic events in our problem. We formulate the problem as a constrained Markov decision process which takes into account tardiness and available vehicles as cumulative and instantaneous constraints, respectively. An adaptive constrained reinforcement learning algorithm that combines Lagrangian relaxation and invalid action masking, named RCPOM, is proposed to address the problem with two hybrid constraints. Moreover, a gym-like dynamic material handling simulator, named DMH-GYM, is developed and equipped with diverse problem instances, which can be used as benchmarks for dynamic material handling. Experimental results on the problem instances demonstrate the outstanding performance of our proposed approach compared with eight state-of-the-art constrained and non-constrained reinforcement learning algorithms, and widely used dispatching rules for material handling.
Advances and Challenges of Multi-task Learning Method in Recommender System: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-task learning has been widely applied in computational vision, natural language processing and other fields, which has achieved well performance. In recent years, a lot of work about multi-task learning recommender system has been yielded, but there is no previous literature to summarize these works. To bridge this gap, we provide a systematic literature survey about multi-task recommender systems, aiming to help researchers and practitioners quickly understand the current progress in this direction. In this survey, we first introduce the background and the motivation of the multi-task learning-based recommender systems. Then we provide a taxonomy of multi-task learning-based recommendation methods according to the different stages of multi-task learning techniques, which including task relationship discovery, model architecture and optimization strategy. Finally, we raise discussions on the application and promising future directions in this area.
Global Structure Knowledge-Guided Relation Extraction Method for Visually-Rich Document
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Visual Relation Extraction (VRE) is a powerful means of discovering relationships between entities within visually-rich documents. Existing methods often focus on manipulating entity features to find pairwise relations, yet neglect the more fundamental structural information that links disparate entity pairs together. The absence of global structure information may make the model struggle to learn long-range relations and easily predict conflicted results. To alleviate such limitations, we propose a GlObal Structure knowledge-guided relation Extraction (GOSE) framework. GOSE initiates by generating preliminary relation predictions on entity pairs extracted from a scanned image of the document. Subsequently, global structural knowledge is captured from the preceding iterative predictions, which are then incorporated into the representations of the entities. This "generate-capture-incorporate" cycle is repeated multiple times, allowing entity representations and global structure knowledge to be mutually reinforced. Extensive experiments validate that GOSE not only outperforms existing methods in the standard fine-tuning setting but also reveals superior cross-lingual learning capabilities; indeed, even yields stronger data-efficient performance in the low-resource setting. The code for GOSE will be available at https://github.com/chenxn2020/GOSE.
A Trip Towards Fairness: Bias and De-Biasing in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Cheap-to-Build Very Large-Language Models (CtB-LLMs) with affordable training are emerging as the next big revolution in natural language processing and understanding. These CtB-LLMs are democratizing access to trainable Very Large-Language Models (VLLMs) and, thus, may represent the building blocks of many NLP systems solving downstream tasks. Hence, a little or a large bias in CtB-LLMs may cause huge harm. In this paper, we performed a large investigation of the bias of three families of CtB-LLMs, and we showed that debiasing techniques are effective and usable. Indeed, according to current tests, the LLaMA and the OPT families have an important bias in gender, race, religion, and profession. In contrast to the analysis for other LLMs, we discovered that bias depends not on the number of parameters but on the perplexity. Finally, the debiasing of OPT using LoRA reduces bias up to 4.12 points in the normalized stereotype score.
Fair Oversampling Technique using Heterogeneous Clusters
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Class imbalance and group (e.g., race, gender, and age) imbalance are acknowledged as two reasons in data that hinder the trade-off between fairness and utility of machine learning classifiers. Existing techniques have jointly addressed issues regarding class imbalance and group imbalance by proposing fair over-sampling techniques. Unlike the common oversampling techniques, which only address class imbalance, fair oversampling techniques significantly improve the abovementioned trade-off, as they can also address group imbalance. However, if the size of the original clusters is too small, these techniques may cause classifier overfitting. To address this problem, we herein develop a fair oversampling technique using data from heterogeneous clusters. The proposed technique generates synthetic data that have class-mix features or group-mix features to make classifiers robust to overfitting. Moreover, we develop an interpolation method that can enhance the validity of generated synthetic data by considering the original cluster distribution and data noise. Finally, we conduct experiments on five realistic datasets and three classifiers, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique in terms of fairness and utility.
A Prelimanary Exploration on component based software engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Component-based software development (CBD) is a methodology that has been embraced by the software industry to accelerate development, save costs and timelines, minimize testing requirements, and boost quality and output. Compared to the conventional software development approach, this led to the system's development being completed more quickly. By choosing components, identifying systems, and evaluating those systems, CBSE contributes significantly to the software development process. The objective of CBSE is to codify and standardize all disciplines that support CBD-related operations. Analysis of the comparison between component-based and scripting technologies reveals that, in terms of qualitative performance, component-based technologies scale more effectively. Further study and application of CBSE are directly related to the CBD approach's success. This paper explores the introductory concepts and comparative analysis related to component-based software engineering which have been around for a while, but proper adaption of CBSE are still lacking issues are also focused.
A comparison between traditional and Serverless technologies in a microservices setting
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Serverless technologies, also known as FaaS (Function as a Service), are promoted as solutions that provide dynamic scalability, speed of development, cost-per-consumption model, and the ability to focus on the code while taking attention away from the infrastructure that is managed by the vendor. A microservices architecture is defined by the interaction and management of the application state by several independent services, each with a well-defined domain. When implementing software architectures based on microservices, there are several decisions to take about the technologies and the possibility of adopting Serverless. In this study, we implement 9 prototypes of the same microservice application using different technologies. Some architectural decisions and their impact on the performance and cost of the result obtained are analysed. We use Amazon Web Services and start with an application that uses a more traditional deployment environment (Kubernetes) and migration to a serverless architecture is performed by combining and analysing the impact (both cost and performance) of the use of different technologies such as AWS ECS Fargate, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB or DocumentDB.
Metrics Matter in Surgical Phase Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Surgical phase recognition is a basic component for different context-aware applications in computer- and robot-assisted surgery. In recent years, several methods for automatic surgical phase recognition have been proposed, showing promising results. However, a meaningful comparison of these methods is difficult due to differences in the evaluation process and incomplete reporting of evaluation details. In particular, the details of metric computation can vary widely between different studies. To raise awareness of potential inconsistencies, this paper summarizes common deviations in the evaluation of phase recognition algorithms on the Cholec80 benchmark. In addition, a structured overview of previously reported evaluation results on Cholec80 is provided, taking known differences in evaluation protocols into account. Greater attention to evaluation details could help achieve more consistent and comparable results on the surgical phase recognition task, leading to more reliable conclusions about advancements in the field and, finally, translation into clinical practice.
Improving speech translation by fusing speech and text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In speech translation, leveraging multimodal data to improve model performance and address limitations of individual modalities has shown significant effectiveness. In this paper, we harness the complementary strengths of speech and text, which are disparate modalities. We observe three levels of modality gap between them, denoted by Modal input representation, Modal semantic, and Modal hidden states. To tackle these gaps, we propose \textbf{F}use-\textbf{S}peech-\textbf{T}ext (\textbf{FST}), a cross-modal model which supports three distinct input modalities for translation: speech, text, and fused speech-text. We leverage multiple techniques for cross-modal alignment and conduct a comprehensive analysis to assess its impact on speech translation, machine translation, and fused speech-text translation. We evaluate FST on MuST-C, GigaST, and newstest benchmark. Experiments show that the proposed FST achieves an average 34.0 BLEU on MuST-C En$\rightarrow$De/Es/Fr (vs SOTA +1.1 BLEU). Further experiments demonstrate that FST does not degrade on MT task, as observed in prior works. Instead, it yields an average improvement of 3.2 BLEU over the pre-trained MT model.
The CoT Collection: Improving Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning of Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Language models (LMs) with less than 100B parameters are known to perform poorly on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in contrast to large LMs when solving unseen tasks. In this work, we aim to equip smaller LMs with the step-by-step reasoning capability by instruction tuning with CoT rationales. In order to achieve this goal, we first introduce a new instruction-tuning dataset called the CoT Collection, which augments the existing Flan Collection (including only 9 CoT tasks) with additional 1.84 million rationales across 1,060 tasks. We show that CoT fine-tuning Flan-T5 (3B & 11B) with CoT Collection enables smaller LMs to have better CoT capabilities on unseen tasks. On the BIG-Bench-Hard (BBH) benchmark, we report an average improvement of +4.34% (Flan-T5 3B) and +2.60% (Flan-T5 11B), in terms of zero-shot task accuracy. Furthermore, we show that instruction tuning with CoT Collection allows LMs to possess stronger few-shot learning capabilities on 4 domain-specific tasks, resulting in an improvement of +2.24% (Flan-T5 3B) and +2.37% (Flan-T5 11B), even outperforming ChatGPT utilizing demonstrations until the max length by a +13.98% margin. Our code, the CoT Collection data, and model checkpoints are publicly available.
BM25 Query Augmentation Learned End-to-End
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Given BM25's enduring competitiveness as an information retrieval baseline, we investigate to what extent it can be even further improved by augmenting and re-weighting its sparse query-vector representation. We propose an approach to learning an augmentation and a re-weighting end-to-end, and we find that our approach improves performance over BM25 while retaining its speed. We furthermore find that the learned augmentations and re-weightings transfer well to unseen datasets.
Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Text Classification: Past, Present, and Future
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning (ML) systems in natural language processing (NLP) face significant challenges in generalizing to out-of-distribution (OOD) data, where the test distribution differs from the training data distribution. This poses important questions about the robustness of NLP models and their high accuracy, which may be artificially inflated due to their underlying sensitivity to systematic biases. Despite these challenges, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys on the generalization challenge from an OOD perspective in text classification. Therefore, this paper aims to fill this gap by presenting the first comprehensive review of recent progress, methods, and evaluations on this topic. We furth discuss the challenges involved and potential future research directions. By providing quick access to existing work, we hope this survey will encourage future research in this area.
Learning Remote Sensing Object Detection with Single Point Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Pointly Supervised Object Detection (PSOD) has attracted considerable interests due to its lower labeling cost as compared to box-level supervised object detection. However, the complex scenes, densely packed and dynamic-scale objects in Remote Sensing (RS) images hinder the development of PSOD methods in RS field. In this paper, we make the first attempt to achieve RS object detection with single point supervision, and propose a PSOD method tailored for RS images. Specifically, we design a point label upgrader (PLUG) to generate pseudo box labels from single point labels, and then use the pseudo boxes to supervise the optimization of existing detectors. Moreover, to handle the challenge of the densely packed objects in RS images, we propose a sparse feature guided semantic prediction module which can generate high-quality semantic maps by fully exploiting informative cues from sparse objects. Extensive ablation studies on the DOTA dataset have validated the effectiveness of our method. Our method can achieve significantly better performance as compared to state-of-the-art image-level and point-level supervised detection methods, and reduce the performance gap between PSOD and box-level supervised object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/heshitian/PLUG.
Industry Practices for Challenging Autonomous Driving Systems with Critical Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Testing autonomous driving systems for safety and reliability is extremely complex. A primary challenge is identifying the relevant test scenarios, especially the critical ones that may expose hazards or risks of harm to autonomous vehicles and other road users. There are several proposed methods and tools for critical scenario identification, while the industry practices, such as the selection, implementation, and limitations of the approaches, are not well understood. In this study, we conducted 10 interviews with 13 interviewees from 7 companies in autonomous driving in Sweden. We used thematic modeling to analyse and synthesize the interview data. We found there are little joint efforts in the industry to explore different approaches and tools, and every approach has its own limitations and weaknesses. To that end, we recommend combining different approaches available, collaborating among different stakeholders, and continuously learning the field of critical scenario identification and testing. The contributions of our study are the exploration and synthesis of the industry practices and related challenges for critical scenario identification and testing, and the potential increase of the industry relevance for future studies in related topics.
Solving Stabilize-Avoid Optimal Control via Epigraph Form and Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Tasks for autonomous robotic systems commonly require stabilization to a desired region while maintaining safety specifications. However, solving this multi-objective problem is challenging when the dynamics are nonlinear and high-dimensional, as traditional methods do not scale well and are often limited to specific problem structures. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach to solve the stabilize-avoid problem via the solution of an infinite-horizon constrained optimal control problem (OCP). We transform the constrained OCP into epigraph form and obtain a two-stage optimization problem that optimizes over the policy in the inner problem and over an auxiliary variable in the outer problem. We then propose a new method for this formulation that combines an on-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithm with neural network regression. Our method yields better stability during training, avoids instabilities caused by saddle-point finding, and is not restricted to specific requirements on the problem structure compared to more traditional methods. We validate our approach on different benchmark tasks, ranging from low-dimensional toy examples to an F16 fighter jet with a 17-dimensional state space. Simulation results show that our approach consistently yields controllers that match or exceed the safety of existing methods while providing ten-fold increases in stability performance from larger regions of attraction.
SXVCS: An XOR-based Visual Cryptography Scheme without Noise via Linear Algebra
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Visual Cryptography Schemes (VCS) based on the "XOR" operation (XVCS) exhibit significantly smaller pixel expansion and higher contrast compared to those based on the "OR" operation. Moreover, the "XOR" operation appears to possess superior qualities, as it effectively operates within a binary field, while the "OR" operation merely functions as a ring with identity. Despite these remarkable attributes, our understanding of XVCS remains limited. Especially, we have done little about the noise in the reconstructed image up to now. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept called Static XVCS (SXVCS), which completely eliminates the noise in the reconstructed image. We also demonstrate that the equivalent condition for perfect white pixel reconstruction is simply the existence of SXVCS. For its application, we naturally propose an efficient method for determining the existence of XVCS with perfect white pixel reconstruction. Furthermore, we apply our theorem to $(2,n)$-XVCS and achieve the optimal state of $(2,n)$-XVCS.
Goat: Fine-tuned LLaMA Outperforms GPT-4 on Arithmetic Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce Goat, a fine-tuned LLaMA model that significantly outperforms GPT-4 on a range of arithmetic tasks. Fine-tuned on a synthetically generated dataset, Goat achieves state-of-the-art performance on BIG-bench arithmetic sub-task. In particular, the zero-shot Goat-7B matches or even surpasses the accuracy achieved by the few-shot PaLM-540B. Surprisingly, Goat can achieve near-perfect accuracy on large-number addition and subtraction through supervised fine-tuning only, which is almost impossible with previous pretrained language models, such as Bloom, OPT, GPT-NeoX, etc. We attribute Goat's exceptional performance to LLaMA's consistent tokenization of numbers. To tackle more challenging tasks like large-number multiplication and division, we propose an approach that classifies tasks based on their learnability, and subsequently decomposes unlearnable tasks, such as multi-digit multiplication and division, into a series of learnable tasks by leveraging basic arithmetic principles. We thoroughly examine the performance of our model, offering a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of our proposed decomposition steps. Additionally, Goat-7B can be easily trained using LoRA on a 24GB VRAM GPU, facilitating reproducibility for other researchers. We release our model, dataset, and the Python script for dataset generation.