OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
MedPromptExtract (Medical Data Extraction Tool): Anonymization and Hi-fidelity Automated data extraction using NLP and prompt engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Introduction: The labour-intensive nature of data extraction from sources like discharge summaries (DS) poses significant obstacles to the digitisation of medical records particularly for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In this paper we present a completely automated method MedPromptExtract to efficiently extract data from DS while maintaining confidentiality. Methods: The source of data was Discharge Summaries (DS) from Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital (KDAH) of patients having Acute Kidney Injury (AKI). A pre-existing tool EIGEN which leverages semi-supervised learning techniques for high-fidelity information extraction was used to anonymize the DS, Natural Language Processing (NLP) was used to extract data from regular fields. We used Prompt Engineering and Large Language Model(LLM) to extract custom clinical information from free flowing text describing the patients stay in the hospital. Twelve features associated with occurrence of AKI were extracted. The LLM responses were validated against clinicians annotations. Results: The MedPromptExtracttool first subjected DS to the anonymization pipeline which took three seconds per summary. Successful anonymization was verified by clinicians, thereafter NLP pipeline extracted structured text from the anonymized pdfs at the rate of 0.2 seconds per summary with 100% accuracy.Finally DS were analysed by the LLM pipeline using Gemini Pro for the twelve features. Accuracy metrics were calculated by comparing model responses to clinicians annotations with seven features achieving AUCs above 0.9, indicating high fidelity of the extraction process. Conclusion: MedPromptExtract serves as an automated adaptable tool for efficient data extraction from medical records with a dynamic user interface. Keywords: Digitizing Medical Records, Automated Anonymisation, Information Retrieval, Large Language Models, Prompt Engineering
Peak Age of Information under Tandem of Queues
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper considers a communication system where a source sends time-sensitive information to its destination via queues in tandem. We assume that the arrival process as well as the service process (of each server) are memoryless, and each of the servers has no buffer. For this setup, we develop a recursive framework to characterize the mean peak age of information (PAoI) under preemptive and non-preemptive policies with $N$ servers having different service rates. For the preemptive case, the proposed framework also allows to obtain mean age of information (AoI).
The Role of AI in Peer Support for Young People: A Study of Preferences for Human- and AI-Generated Responses
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is integrated into everyday technology, including news, education, and social media. AI has further pervaded private conversations as conversational partners, auto-completion, and response suggestions. As social media becomes young people's main method of peer support exchange, we need to understand when and how AI can facilitate and assist in such exchanges in a beneficial, safe, and socially appropriate way. We asked 622 young people to complete an online survey and evaluate blinded human- and AI-generated responses to help-seeking messages. We found that participants preferred the AI-generated response to situations about relationships, self-expression, and physical health. However, when addressing a sensitive topic, like suicidal thoughts, young people preferred the human response. We also discuss the role of training in online peer support exchange and its implications for supporting young people's well-being. Disclaimer: This paper includes sensitive topics, including suicide ideation. Reader discretion is advised.
CoE-SQL: In-Context Learning for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL with Chain-of-Editions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been demonstrated to possess impressive capabilities in a variety of domains and tasks. We investigate the issue of prompt design in the multi-turn text-to-SQL task and attempt to enhance the LLMs' reasoning capacity when generating SQL queries. In the conversational context, the current SQL query can be modified from the preceding SQL query with only a few operations due to the context dependency. We introduce our method called CoE-SQL which can prompt LLMs to generate the SQL query based on the previously generated SQL query with an edition chain. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to determine the optimal configuration of our approach. Our approach outperforms different in-context learning baselines stably and achieves state-of-the-art performances on two benchmarks SParC and CoSQL using LLMs, which is also competitive to the SOTA fine-tuned models.
Active Signal Emitter Placement In Complex Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Placement of electromagnetic signal emitting devices, such as light sources, has important usage in for signal coverage tasks. Automatic placement of these devices is challenging because of the complex interaction of the signal and environment due to reflection, refraction and scattering. In this work, we iteratively improve the placement of these devices by interleaving device placement and sensing actions, correcting errors in the model of the signal propagation. To this end, we propose a novel factor-graph based belief model which combines the measurements taken by the robot and an analytical light propagation model. This model allows accurately modelling the uncertainty of the light propagation with respect to the obstacles, which greatly improves the informative path planning routine. Additionally, we propose a method for determining when to re-plan the emitter placements to balance a trade-off between information about a specific configuration and frequent updating of the configuration. This method incorporates the uncertainty from belief model to adaptively determine when re-configuration is needed. We find that our system has a 9.8% median error reduction compared to a baseline system in simulations in the most difficult environment. We also run on-robot tests and determine that our system performs favorably compared to the baseline.
Sub-goal Distillation: A Method to Improve Small Language Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant promise as agents in interactive tasks, their substantial computational requirements and restricted number of calls constrain their practical utility, especially in long-horizon interactive tasks such as decision-making or in scenarios involving continuous ongoing tasks. To address these constraints, we propose a method for transferring the performance of an LLM with billions of parameters to a much smaller language model (770M parameters). Our approach involves constructing a hierarchical agent comprising a planning module, which learns through Knowledge Distillation from an LLM to generate sub-goals, and an execution module, which learns to accomplish these sub-goals using elementary actions. In detail, we leverage an LLM to annotate an oracle path with a sequence of sub-goals towards completing a goal. Subsequently, we utilize this annotated data to fine-tune both the planning and execution modules. Importantly, neither module relies on real-time access to an LLM during inference, significantly reducing the overall cost associated with LLM interactions to a fixed cost. In ScienceWorld, a challenging and multi-task interactive text environment, our method surpasses standard imitation learning based solely on elementary actions by 16.7% (absolute). Our analysis highlights the efficiency of our approach compared to other LLM-based methods. Our code and annotated data for distillation can be found on GitHub.
Region-Aware Color Smudging
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Color smudge operations from digital painting software enable users to create natural shading effects in high-fidelity paintings by interactively mixing colors. To precisely control results in traditional painting software, users tend to organize flat-filled color regions in multiple layers and smudge them to generate different color gradients. However, the requirement to carefully deal with regions makes the smudging process time-consuming and laborious, especially for non-professional users. This motivates us to investigate how to infer user-desired smudging effects when users smudge over regions in a single layer. To investigate improving color smudge performance, we first conduct a formative study. Following the findings of this study, we design SmartSmudge, a novel smudge tool that offers users dynamical smudge brushes and real-time region selection for easily generating natural and efficient shading effects. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed tool via a user study and quantitative analysis
PhilHumans: Benchmarking Machine Learning for Personal Health
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The use of machine learning in Healthcare has the potential to improve patient outcomes as well as broaden the reach and affordability of Healthcare. The history of other application areas indicates that strong benchmarks are essential for the development of intelligent systems. We present Personal Health Interfaces Leveraging HUman-MAchine Natural interactions (PhilHumans), a holistic suite of benchmarks for machine learning across different Healthcare settings - talk therapy, diet coaching, emergency care, intensive care, obstetric sonography - as well as different learning settings, such as action anticipation, timeseries modeling, insight mining, language modeling, computer vision, reinforcement learning and program synthesis
Graph as Point Set
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph is a fundamental data structure to model interconnections between entities. Set, on the contrary, stores independent elements. To learn graph representations, current Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) primarily use message passing to encode the interconnections. In contrast, this paper introduces a novel graph-to-set conversion method that bijectively transforms interconnected nodes into a set of independent points and then uses a set encoder to learn the graph representation. This conversion method holds dual significance. Firstly, it enables using set encoders to learn from graphs, thereby significantly expanding the design space of GNNs. Secondly, for Transformer, a specific set encoder, we provide a novel and principled approach to inject graph information losslessly, different from all the heuristic structural/positional encoding methods adopted in previous graph transformers. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce Point Set Transformer (PST), a transformer architecture that accepts a point set converted from a graph as input. Theoretically, PST exhibits superior expressivity for both short-range substructure counting and long-range shortest path distance tasks compared to existing GNNs. Extensive experiments further validate PST's outstanding real-world performance. Besides Transformer, we also devise a Deepset-based set encoder, which achieves performance comparable to representative GNNs, affirming the versatility of our graph-to-set method.
Algorithmic collusion in a two-sided market: A rideshare example
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

With dynamic pricing on the rise, firms are using sophisticated algorithms for price determination. These algorithms are often non-interpretable and there has been a recent interest in their seemingly emergent ability to tacitly collude with each other without any prior communication whatsoever. Most of the previous works investigate algorithmic collusion on simple reinforcement learning (RL) based algorithms operating on a basic market model. Instead, we explore the collusive tendencies of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), a state-of-the-art continuous state/action space RL algorithm, on a complex double-sided hierarchical market model of rideshare. For this purpose, we extend a mathematical program network (MPN) based rideshare model to a temporal multi origin-destination setting and use PPO to solve for a repeated duopoly game. Our results indicate that PPO can either converge to a competitive or a collusive equilibrium depending upon the underlying market characteristics, even when the hyper-parameters are held constant.
Two-weight rank-metric codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Two-weight linear codes are linear codes in which any nonzero codeword can have only two possible distinct weights. Those in the Hamming metric have proven to be very interesting for their connections with authentication codes, association schemes, strongly regular graphs, and secret sharing schemes. In this paper, we characterize two-weight codes in the rank metric, answering a recent question posed by Pratihar and Randrianarisoa.
Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities When Inferring Requirements From Regulations in the FinTech Sector - An Industrial Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

[Context and motivation]: Understanding and interpreting regulatory norms and inferring software requirements from them is a critical step towards regulatory compliance, a matter of significant importance in various industrial sectors. [Question/ problem]: However, interpreting regulations still largely depends on individual legal expertise and experience within the respective domain, with little to no systematic methodologies and supportive tools to guide this practice. In fact, research in this area is too often detached from practitioners' experiences, rendering the proposed solutions not transferable to industrial practice. As we argue, one reason is that we still lack a profound understanding of industry- and domain-specific practices and challenges. [Principal ideas/ results]: We aim to close this gap and provide such an investigation at the example of the banking and insurance domain. We conduct an industrial multi-case study as part of a long-term academia-industry collaboration with a medium-sized software development and renovation company. We explore contemporary industrial practices and challenges when inferring requirements from regulations to support more problem-driven research. Our study investigates the complexities of requirement engineering in regulatory contexts, pinpointing various issues and discussing them in detail. We highlight the gathered insights and the practical challenges encountered and suggest avenues for future research. [Contribution]: Our contribution is a comprehensive case study focused on the FinTech domain, offering a detailed understanding of the specific needs within this sector. We have identified key practices for managing regulatory requirements in software development, and have pinpointed several challenges. We conclude by offering a set of recommendations for future problem-driven research directions.
DexiTac: Soft Dexterous Tactile Gripping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Grasping object,whether they are flat, round, or narrow and whether they have regular or irregular shapes,introduces difficulties in determining the ideal grasping posture, even for the most state-of-the-art grippers. In this article, we presented a reconfigurable pneumatic gripper with fingers that could be set in various configurations, such as hooking, supporting, closuring, and pinching. Each finger incorporates a dexterous joint, a rotating joint, and a customized plug-and-play visuotactile sensor, the DigiTac-v1.5, to control manipulation in real time. We propose a tactile kernel density manipulation strategy for simple and versatile control, including detecting grasp stability, responding to disturbances and guiding dexterous manipulations. We develop a double closed-loop control system that separately focuses on secure grasping and task management, demonstrated with tasks that highlight the capabilities above. The gripper is relatively easy to fabricate and customize, offering a promising and extensible way to combine soft dexterity and tactile sensing for diverse applications in robotic manipulation.
Distributed Structured Matrix Multiplication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We devise achievable encoding schemes for distributed source compression for computing inner products, symmetric matrix products, and more generally, square matrix products, which are a class of nonlinear transformations. To that end, our approach relies on devising nonlinear mappings of distributed sources, which are then followed by the structured linear encoding scheme, introduced by Körner and Marton. For different computation scenarios, we contrast our findings on the achievable sum rate with the state of the art to demonstrate the possible savings in compression rate. When the sources have special correlation structures, it is possible to achieve unbounded gains, as demonstrated by the analysis and numerical simulations.
Simulation of Optical Tactile Sensors Supporting Slip and Rotation using Path Tracing and IMPM
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Optical tactile sensors are extensively utilized in intelligent robot manipulation due to their ability to acquire high-resolution tactile information at a lower cost. However, achieving adequate reality and versatility in simulating optical tactile sensors is challenging. In this paper, we propose a simulation method and validate its effectiveness through experiments. We utilize path tracing for image rendering, achieving higher similarity to real data than the baseline method in simulating pressing scenarios. Additionally, we apply the improved Material Point Method(IMPM) algorithm to simulate the relative rest between the object and the elastomer surface when the object is in motion, enabling more accurate simulation of complex manipulations such as slip and rotation.
Preventive Audits for Data Applications Before Data Sharing in the Power IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

With the increase in data volume, more types of data are being used and shared, especially in the power Internet of Things (IoT). However, the processes of data sharing may lead to unexpected information leakage because of the ubiquitous relevance among the different data, thus it is necessary for data owners to conduct preventive audits for data applications before data sharing to avoid the risk of key information leakage. Considering that the same data may play completely different roles in different application scenarios, data owners should know the expected data applications of the data buyers in advance and provide modified data that are less relevant to the private information of the data owners and more relevant to the nonprivate information that the data buyers need. In this paper, data sharing in the power IoT is regarded as the background, and the mutual information of the data and their implicit information is selected as the data feature parameter to indicate the relevance between the data and their implicit information or the ability to infer the implicit information from the data. Therefore, preventive audits should be conducted based on changes in the data feature parameters before and after data sharing. The probability exchange adjustment method is proposed as the theoretical basis of preventive audits under simplified consumption, and the corresponding optimization models are constructed and extended to more practical scenarios with multivariate characteristics. Finally, case studies are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed preventive audits.
FairRelay: Fair and Cost-Efficient Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery through Payment Channel Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content delivery, known for scalability and resilience, offers a decentralized alternative to traditional centralized Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). A significant challenge in P2P content delivery remains: the fair compensation of relayers for their bandwidth contributions. Existing solutions employ blockchains for payment settlements, however, they are not practical due to high on-chain costs and over-simplified network assumptions. In this paper, we introduce FairRelay, a fair and cost-efficient protocol that ensures all participants get fair payoff in complex content delivery network settings. We introduce a novel primitive, Enforceable Accumulative Hashed TimeLock Contract (Enforceable A-HTLC), designed to guarantee payment atomicity - ensuring all participants receive their payments upon successful content delivery. The fairness of FairRelay is proved using the Universal Composability (UC) framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that, in optimistic scenarios, FairRelay employs zero on-chain costs. In pessimistic scenarios, the on-chain dispute costs for relayers and customers are constant, irrespective of the network complexity. Specifically, empirical results indicate that the on-chain dispute costs for relayers and customers are 24,902 gas (equivalent to 0.01 USD on Optimism L2) and 290,797 gas (0.07 USD), respectively. In a 10-hop relay path, FairRelay introduces less than 1.5% additional overhead compared to pure data transmission, showcasing the efficiency of FairRelay.
High Order Reasoning for Time Critical Recommendation in Evidence-based Medicine
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In time-critical decisions, human decision-makers can interact with AI-enabled situation-aware software to evaluate many imminent and possible scenarios, retrieve billions of facts, and estimate different outcomes based on trillions of parameters in a fraction of a second. In high-order reasoning, "what-if" questions can be used to challenge the assumptions or pre-conditions of the reasoning, "why-not" questions can be used to challenge on the method applied in the reasoning, "so-what" questions can be used to challenge the purpose of the decision, and "how-about" questions can be used to challenge the applicability of the method. When above high-order reasoning questions are applied to assist human decision-making, it can help humans to make time-critical decisions and avoid false-negative or false-positive types of errors. In this paper, we present a model of high-order reasoning to offer recommendations in evidence-based medicine in a time-critical fashion for the applications in ICU. The Large Language Model (LLM) is used in our system. The experiments demonstrated the LLM exhibited optimal performance in the "What-if" scenario, achieving a similarity of 88.52% with the treatment plans of human doctors. In the "Why-not" scenario, the best-performing model tended to opt for alternative treatment plans in 70% of cases for patients who died after being discharged from the ICU. In the "So-what" scenario, the optimal model provided a detailed analysis of the motivation and significance of treatment plans for ICU patients, with its reasoning achieving a similarity of 55.6% with actual diagnostic information. In the "How-about" scenario, the top-performing LLM demonstrated a content similarity of 66.5% in designing treatment plans transferring for similar diseases. Meanwhile, LLMs managed to predict the life status of patients after their discharge from the ICU with an accuracy of 70%.