OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reasoning Paths Optimization: Learning to Reason and Explore From Diverse Paths
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Advanced models such as OpenAI o1 exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities through step-by-step reasoning. However, they may still falter on more complex problems, making errors that disrupt their reasoning paths. We attribute this to the expansive solution space, where each step has the risk of diverging into mistakes. To enhance language model reasoning, we introduce a specialized training framework called Reasoning Paths Optimization (RPO), which enables learning to reason and explore from diverse paths. Our approach encourages favorable branches at each reasoning step while penalizing unfavorable ones, enhancing the model's overall problem-solving performance. Reasoning Paths Optimization does not rely on large-scale human-annotated rationales or outputs from closed-source models, making it scalable and data-efficient. We focus on multi-step reasoning tasks, such as math word problems and science-based exam questions. The experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the reasoning performance of large language models, with up to 3.1% and 4.3% improvement on GSM8K and MMLU (STEM) respectively. Our data and code can be found at https://reasoning-paths.github.io.
Translation Canvas: An Explainable Interface to Pinpoint and Analyze Translation Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid advancement of machine translation research, evaluation toolkits have become essential for benchmarking system progress. Tools like COMET and SacreBLEU offer single quality score assessments that are effective for pairwise system comparisons. However, these tools provide limited insights for fine-grained system-level comparisons and the analysis of instance-level defects. To address these limitations, we introduce Translation Canvas, an explainable interface designed to pinpoint and analyze translation systems' performance: 1) Translation Canvas assists machine translation researchers in comprehending system-level model performance by identifying common errors (their frequency and severity) and analyzing relationships between different systems based on various evaluation metrics. 2) It supports fine-grained analysis by highlighting error spans with explanations and selectively displaying systems' predictions. According to human evaluation, Translation Canvas demonstrates superior performance over COMET and SacreBLEU packages under enjoyability and understandability criteria.
Generating Synthetic Datasets for Few-shot Prompt Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

A major limitation of prompt tuning is its dependence on large labeled training datasets. Under few-shot learning settings, prompt tuning lags far behind full-model fine-tuning, limiting its scope of application. In this paper, we leverage the powerful LLMs to synthesize task-specific labeled data for training the soft prompts. We first introduce a distribution-aligned weighted generator tuning (DawGen) method to encourage generating in-distribution data that aligns with the few-shot real data. Then, we train soft prompts on both synthetic and real datasets using a gradient surgery approach, which eliminates the conflicting gradients from different data sources. Experiments on seven sentence-pair classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for boosting prompt tuning in few-shot learning settings. Results on QQP, MRPC, and SICK datasets are even comparable to the performance of transfer learning from large real-world datasets, showing the promise of synthetic data as an alternative for enhancing soft prompt tuning.
Application of NotebookLM, a Large Language Model with Retrieval-Augmented Generation, for Lung Cancer Staging
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Purpose: In radiology, large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT, have recently gained attention, and their utility is being rapidly evaluated. However, concerns have emerged regarding their reliability in clinical applications due to limitations such as hallucinations and insufficient referencing. To address these issues, we focus on the latest technology, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which enables LLMs to reference reliable external knowledge (REK). Specifically, this study examines the utility and reliability of a recently released RAG-equipped LLM (RAG-LLM), NotebookLM, for staging lung cancer. Materials and methods: We summarized the current lung cancer staging guideline in Japan and provided this as REK to NotebookLM. We then tasked NotebookLM with staging 100 fictional lung cancer cases based on CT findings and evaluated its accuracy. For comparison, we performed the same task using a gold-standard LLM, GPT-4 Omni (GPT-4o), both with and without the REK. Results: NotebookLM achieved 86% diagnostic accuracy in the lung cancer staging experiment, outperforming GPT-4o, which recorded 39% accuracy with the REK and 25% without it. Moreover, NotebookLM demonstrated 95% accuracy in searching reference locations within the REK. Conclusion: NotebookLM successfully performed lung cancer staging by utilizing the REK, demonstrating superior performance compared to GPT-4o. Additionally, it provided highly accurate reference locations within the REK, allowing radiologists to efficiently evaluate the reliability of NotebookLM's responses and detect possible hallucinations. Overall, this study highlights the potential of NotebookLM, a RAG-LLM, in image diagnosis.
An Explainable AI Model for Predicting the Recurrence of Differentiated Thyroid Cancer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Thyroid carcinoma, a significant yet often controllable cancer, has seen a rise in cases, largely due to advancements in diagnostic methods. Differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC), which includes papillary and follicular varieties, is typically associated with a positive prognosis in academic circles. Nevertheless, there are still some individuals who may experience a recurrence. This study employs machine learning, particularly deep learning models, to predict the recurrence of DTC, with the goal of improving patient care through personalized treatment approaches. By analysing a dataset containing clinicopathological features of patients, the model achieved remarkable accuracy rates of 98% during training and 96% during testing. To improve the model's interpretability, we used techniques like LIME and Morris Sensitivity Analysis. These methods gave us valuable insights into how the model makes decisions. The results suggest that combining deep learning models with interpretability techniques can be extremely useful in quickly identifying the recurrence of thyroid cancer in patients. This can help in making informed therapeutic choices and customizing treatment approaches for individual patients.
The State of Julia for Scientific Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Julia has been heralded as a potential successor to Python for scientific machine learning and numerical computing, boasting ergonomic and performance improvements. Since Julia's inception in 2012 and declaration of language goals in 2017, its ecosystem and language-level features have grown tremendously. In this paper, we take a modern look at Julia's features and ecosystem, assess the current state of the language, and discuss its viability and pitfalls as a replacement for Python as the de-facto scientific machine learning language. We call for the community to address Julia's language-level issues that are preventing further adoption.
Stationary Velocity Fields on Matrix Groups for Deformable Image Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The stationary velocity field (SVF) approach allows to build parametrizations of invertible deformation fields, which is often a desirable property in image registration. Its expressiveness is particularly attractive when used as a block following a machine learning-inspired network. However, it can struggle with large deformations. We extend the SVF approach to matrix groups, in particular $\SE(3)$. This moves Euclidean transformations into the low-frequency part, towards which network architectures are often naturally biased, so that larger motions can be recovered more easily. This requires an extension of the flow equation, for which we provide sufficient conditions for existence. We further prove a decomposition condition that allows us to apply a scaling-and-squaring approach for efficient numerical integration of the flow equation. We numerically validate the approach on inter-patient registration of 3D MRI images of the human brain.
Assessing the Human Likeness of AI-Generated Counterspeech
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Counterspeech is a targeted response to counteract and challenge abusive or hateful content. It effectively curbs the spread of hatred and fosters constructive online communication. Previous studies have proposed different strategies for automatically generated counterspeech. Evaluations, however, focus on relevance, surface form, and other shallow linguistic characteristics. This paper investigates the human likeness of AI-generated counterspeech, a critical factor influencing effectiveness. We implement and evaluate several LLM-based generation strategies, and discover that AI-generated and human-written counterspeech can be easily distinguished by both simple classifiers and humans. Further, we reveal differences in linguistic characteristics, politeness, and specificity. The dataset used in this study is publicly available for further research.
Enhancing AI Assisted Writing with One-Shot Implicit Negative Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

AI-mediated communication enables users to communicate more quickly and efficiently. Various systems have been proposed such as smart reply and AI-assisted writing. Yet, the heterogeneity of the forms of inputs and architectures often renders it challenging to combine insights from user behaviour in one system to improve performance in another. In this work, we consider the case where the user does not select any of the suggested replies from a smart reply system, and how this can be used as one-shot implicit negative feedback to enhance the accuracy of an AI writing model. We introduce Nifty, an approach that uses classifier guidance to controllably integrate implicit user feedback into the text generation process. Empirically, we find up to 34% improvement in Rouge-L, 89% improvement in generating the correct intent, and an 86% win-rate according to human evaluators compared to a vanilla AI writing system on the MultiWOZ and Schema-Guided Dialog datasets.
Varying Shades of Wrong: Aligning LLMs with Wrong Answers Only
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the absence of abundant reliable annotations for challenging tasks and contexts, how can we expand the frontier of LLM capabilities with potentially wrong answers? We focus on two research questions: (1) Can LLMs generate reliable preferences among wrong options? And if so, (2) Would alignment with such wrong-over-wrong preferences be helpful? We employ methods based on self-consistency, token probabilities, and LLM-as-a-judge to elicit wrong-over-wrong preferences, and fine-tune language models with preference optimization approaches using these synthesized preferences. Extensive experiments with seven LLMs and eight datasets demonstrate that (1) LLMs do have preliminary capability in distinguishing various shades of wrong, achieving up to 20.9% higher performance than random guess; (2) Alignment with wrong-over-wrong preferences helps LLMs to produce less wrong and sometimes even outright correct answers, while overall improving model calibration.
Energy-Efficient Cryogenic Ternary Content Addressable Memory using Ferroelectric SQUID
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs) are useful for certain computing tasks since they allow us to compare a search query with a whole dataset stored in the memory array. They can also unlock unique advantages for cryogenic applications like quantum computing, high-performance computing, and space exploration by improving speed and energy efficiency through parallel searching. This paper explores the design and implementation of a cryogenic ternary content addressable memory based on ferroelectric superconducting quantum interference devices (FeSQUIDs). The use of FeSQUID for designing the TCAM provides several unique advantages. First, we can get binary decisions (zero or non-zero voltage) for matching and mismatching conditions without using any peripheral circuitry. Moreover, the proposed TCAM needs ultra-low energy (1.36 aJ and 26.5 aJ average energy consumption for 1-bit binary and ternary search, respectively), thanks to the use of energy-efficient SQUIDs. Finally, we show the efficiency of FeSQUID through the brain-inspired application of Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC). Here, the FeSQUID-based TCAM implements the associative memory to support the highly parallel search needed in the inference step. We estimate an energy consumption of 89.4 fJ per vector comparison using a vector size of 10,000 bits. We also compare the FeSQUID-based TCAM array with the 5nm FinFET-based cryogenic SRAM-based TCAM array and observe that the proposed FeSQUID-based TCAM array consumes over one order of magnitude lower energy while performing the same task.
EchoApex: A General-Purpose Vision Foundation Model for Echocardiography
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Quantitative evaluation of echocardiography is essential for precise assessment of cardiac condition, monitoring disease progression, and guiding treatment decisions. The diverse nature of echo images, including variations in probe types, manufacturers, and pathologies, poses challenges for developing artificial intelligent models that can generalize across different clinical practice. We introduce EchoApex, the first general-purpose vision foundation model echocardiography with applications on a variety of clinical practice. Leveraging self-supervised learning, EchoApex is pretrained on over 20 million echo images from 11 clinical centres. By incorporating task-specific decoders and adapter modules, we demonstrate the effectiveness of EchoApex on 4 different kind of clinical applications with 28 sub-tasks, including view classification, interactive structure segmentation, left ventricle hypertrophy detection and automated ejection fraction estimation from view sequences. Compared to state-of-the-art task-specific models, EchoApex attains improved performance with a unified image encoding architecture, demonstrating the benefits of model pretraining at scale with in-domain data. Furthermore, EchoApex illustrates the potential for developing a general-purpose vision foundation model tailored specifically for echocardiography, capable of addressing a diverse range of clinical applications with high efficiency and efficacy.
Real-Time Localization and Bimodal Point Pattern Analysis of Palms Using UAV Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding the spatial distribution of palms within tropical forests is essential for effective ecological monitoring, conservation strategies, and the sustainable integration of natural forest products into local and global supply chains. However, the analysis of remotely sensed data in these environments faces significant challenges, such as overlapping palm and tree crowns, uneven shading across the canopy surface, and the heterogeneous nature of the forest landscapes, which often affect the performance of palm detection and segmentation algorithms. To overcome these issues, we introduce PalmDSNet, a deep learning framework for real-time detection, segmentation, and counting of canopy palms. Additionally, we employ a bimodal reproduction algorithm that simulates palm spatial propagation to further enhance the understanding of these point patterns using PalmDSNet's results. We used UAV-captured imagery to create orthomosaics from 21 sites across western Ecuadorian tropical forests, covering a gradient from the everwet Chocó forests near Colombia to the drier forests of southwestern Ecuador. Expert annotations were used to create a comprehensive dataset, including 7,356 bounding boxes on image patches and 7,603 palm centers across five orthomosaics, encompassing a total area of 449 hectares. By combining PalmDSNet with the bimodal reproduction algorithm, which optimizes parameters for both local and global spatial variability, we effectively simulate the spatial distribution of palms in diverse and dense tropical environments, validating its utility for advanced applications in tropical forest monitoring and remote sensing analysis.
IsoChronoMeter: A simple and effective isochronic translation evaluation metric
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Machine translation (MT) has come a long way and is readily employed in production systems to serve millions of users daily. With the recent advances in generative AI, a new form of translation is becoming possible - video dubbing. This work motivates the importance of isochronic translation, especially in the context of automatic dubbing, and introduces `IsoChronoMeter' (ICM). ICM is a simple yet effective metric to measure isochrony of translations in a scalable and resource-efficient way without the need for gold data, based on state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) duration predictors. We motivate IsoChronoMeter and demonstrate its effectiveness. Using ICM we demonstrate the shortcomings of state-of-the-art translation systems and show the need for new methods. We release the code at this URL: \url{https://github.com/braskai/isochronometer}.
Embodied Active Learning of Generative Sensor-Object Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

When a robot encounters a novel object, how should it respond$\unicode{x2014}$what data should it collect$\unicode{x2014}$so that it can find the object in the future? In this work, we present a method for learning image features of an unknown number of novel objects. To do this, we use active coverage with respect to latent uncertainties of the novel descriptions. We apply ergodic stability and PAC-Bayes theory to extend statistical guarantees for VAEs to embodied agents. We demonstrate the method in hardware with a robotic arm; the pipeline is also implemented in a simulated environment. Algorithms and simulation are available open source, see http://sites.google.com/u.northwestern.edu/embodied-learning-hardware .
DGRO: Diameter-Guided Ring Optimization for Integrated Research Infrastructure Membership
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Logical ring is a core component in membership protocol. However, the logic ring fails to consider the underlying physical latency, resulting in a high diameter. To address this issue, we introduce Diameter-Guided Ring Optimization (DGRO), which focuses on constructing rings with the smallest possible diameter, selecting the most effective ring configurations, and implementing these configurations in parallel. We first explore an integration of deep Q-learning and graph embedding to optimize the ring topology. We next propose a ring selection strategy that assesses the current topology's average latency against a global benchmark, facilitating integration into modern peer-to-peer protocols and substantially reducing network diameter. To further enhance scalability, we propose a parallel strategy that distributes the topology construction process into separate partitions simultaneously. Our experiment shows that: 1) DGRO efficiently constructs a network topology that achieves up to a 60% reduction in diameter compared to the best results from an extensive search over $10^5$ topologies, all within a significantly shorter computation time, 2) the ring selection of DGRO reduces the diameter of state-of-the-art methods Chord, RAPID, and Perigee by 10%-40%, 44%, and 60%. 3) the parallel construction can scale up to $32$ partitions while maintaining the same diameter compared to the centralized version.
Synthesizing Proton-Density Fat Fraction and $R_2^*$ from 2-point Dixon MRI with Generative Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is the gold standard for measuring fat and iron content non-invasively in the body via measures known as Proton Density Fat Fraction (PDFF) and $R_2^*$, respectively. However, conventional PDFF and $R_2^*$ quantification methods operate on MR images voxel-wise and require at least three measurements to estimate three quantities: water, fat, and $R_2^*$. Alternatively, the two-point Dixon MRI protocol is widely used and fast because it acquires only two measurements; however, these cannot be used to estimate three quantities voxel-wise. Leveraging the fact that neighboring voxels have similar values, we propose using a generative machine learning approach to learn PDFF and $R_2^*$ from Dixon MRI. We use paired Dixon-IDEAL data from UK Biobank in the liver and a Pix2Pix conditional GAN to demonstrate the first large-scale $R_2^*$ imputation from two-point Dixon MRIs. Using our proposed approach, we synthesize PDFF and $R_2^*$ maps that show significantly greater correlation with ground-truth than conventional voxel-wise baselines.
Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning: A Tool for Pluralistic Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a valuable tool for the creation of AI systems. However it may be problematic to adequately align RL based on scalar rewards if there are multiple conflicting values or stakeholders to be considered. Over the last decade multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) using vector rewards has emerged as an alternative to standard, scalar RL. This paper provides an overview of the role which MORL can play in creating pluralistically-aligned AI.
Advancing the Understanding of Fixed Point Iterations in Deep Neural Networks: A Detailed Analytical Study
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent empirical studies have identified fixed point iteration phenomena in deep neural networks, where the hidden state tends to stabilize after several layers, showing minimal change in subsequent layers. This observation has spurred the development of practical methodologies, such as accelerating inference by bypassing certain layers once the hidden state stabilizes, selectively fine-tuning layers to modify the iteration process, and implementing loops of specific layers to maintain fixed point iterations. Despite these advancements, the understanding of fixed point iterations remains superficial, particularly in high-dimensional spaces, due to the inadequacy of current analytical tools. In this study, we conduct a detailed analysis of fixed point iterations in a vector-valued function modeled by neural networks. We establish a sufficient condition for the existence of multiple fixed points of looped neural networks based on varying input regions. Additionally, we expand our examination to include a robust version of fixed point iterations. To demonstrate the effectiveness and insights provided by our approach, we provide case studies that looped neural networks may exist $2^d$ number of robust fixed points under exponentiation or polynomial activation functions, where $d$ is the feature dimension. Furthermore, our preliminary empirical results support our theoretical findings. Our methodology enriches the toolkit available for analyzing fixed point iterations of deep neural networks and may enhance our comprehension of neural network mechanisms.