pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep vectorised operators for pulsatile hemodynamics estimation in coronary arteries from a steady-state prior
Authors: Julian Suk, Guido Nannini, Patryk Rygiel, Christoph Brune, Gianluca Pontone, Alberto Redaelli, Jelmer M. Wolterink
Date: 2024-10-15 00:00:00

Cardiovascular hemodynamic fields provide valuable medical decision markers for coronary artery disease. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is the gold standard for accurate, non-invasive evaluation of these quantities in vivo. In this work, we propose a time-efficient surrogate model, powered by machine learning, for the estimation of pulsatile hemodynamics based on steady-state priors. We introduce deep vectorised operators, a modelling framework for discretisation independent learning on infinite-dimensional function spaces. The underlying neural architecture is a neural field conditioned on hemodynamic boundary conditions. Importantly, we show how relaxing the requirement of point-wise action to permutation-equivariance leads to a family of models that can be parametrised by message passing and self-attention layers. We evaluate our approach on a dataset of 74 stenotic coronary arteries extracted from coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) with patient-specific pulsatile CFD simulations as ground truth. We show that our model produces accurate estimates of the pulsatile velocity and pressure while being agnostic to re-sampling of the source domain (discretisation independence). This shows that deep vectorised operators are a powerful modelling tool for cardiovascular hemodynamics estimation in coronary arteries and beyond.
Large-Scale Knowledge Integration for Enhanced Molecular Property Prediction
Authors: Yasir Ghunaim, Robert Hoehndorf
Date: 2024-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, Molecular Property Prediction, Prediction, Property Prediction

Pre-training machine learning models on molecular properties has proven effective for generating robust and generalizable representations, which is critical for advancements in drug discovery and materials science. While recent work has primarily focused on data-driven approaches, the KANO model introduces a novel paradigm by incorporating knowledge-enhanced pre-training. In this work, we expand upon KANO by integrating the large-scale ChEBI knowledge graph, which includes 2,840 functional groups -- significantly more than the original 82 used in KANO. We explore two approaches, Replace and Integrate, to incorporate this extensive knowledge into the KANO framework. Our results demonstrate that including ChEBI leads to improved performance on 9 out of 14 molecular property prediction datasets. This highlights the importance of utilizing a larger and more diverse set of functional groups to enhance molecular representations for property predictions. Code: github.com/Yasir-Ghunaim/KANO-ChEBI
Context is Key(NMF): Modelling Topical Information Dynamics in Chinese Diaspora Media
Authors: Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, Rebecca M. M. Hicke, Márton Kardos, Mette Thunø
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00

Does the People's Republic of China (PRC) interfere with European elections through ethnic Chinese diaspora media? This question forms the basis of an ongoing research project exploring how PRC narratives about European elections are represented in Chinese diaspora media, and thus the objectives of PRC news media manipulation. In order to study diaspora media efficiently and at scale, it is necessary to use techniques derived from quantitative text analysis, such as topic modelling. In this paper, we present a pipeline for studying information dynamics in Chinese media. Firstly, we present KeyNMF, a new approach to static and dynamic topic modelling using transformer-based contextual embedding models. We provide benchmark evaluations to demonstrate that our approach is competitive on a number of Chinese datasets and metrics. Secondly, we integrate KeyNMF with existing methods for describing information dynamics in complex systems. We apply this pipeline to data from five news sites, focusing on the period of time leading up to the 2024 European parliamentary elections. Our methods and results demonstrate the effectiveness of KeyNMF for studying information dynamics in Chinese media and lay groundwork for further work addressing the broader research questions.
Meta-Chunking: Learning Text Segmentation and Semantic Completion via Logical Perception
Authors: Jihao Zhao, Zhiyuan Ji, Yuchen Feng, Pengnian Qi, Simin Niu, Bo Tang, Feiyu Xiong, Zhiyu Li
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Chunking, Instruction Following, Multi-hop Question Answering, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Text Segmentation

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising paradigm for boosting large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks, it often overlooks the crucial aspect of text chunking within its workflow. This paper proposes the Meta-Chunking framework, which specifically enhances chunking quality through a dual strategy that identifies optimal segmentation points and preserves global information. Initially, breaking limitations of similarity-based chunking, we design two adaptive chunking techniques based on uncertainty, namely Perplexity Chunking and Margin Sampling Chunking, by utilizing the logical perception capabilities of LLMs. Given the inherent complexity across different texts, we integrate meta-chunk with dynamic merging, striking a balance between fine-grained and coarse-grained text chunking. Furthermore, we establish the global information compensation mechanism, encompassing a two-stage hierarchical summary generation process and a three-stage text chunk rewriting procedure focused on missing reflection, refinement, and completion. These components collectively strengthen the semantic integrity and contextual coherence of chunks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Meta-Chunking effectively addresses challenges of the chunking task within the RAG system, providing LLMs with more logically coherent text chunks. Additionally, our methodology validates the feasibility of implementing high-quality chunking tasks with smaller-scale models, thereby eliminating the reliance on robust instruction-following capabilities.
In-Context Learning Enables Robot Action Prediction in LLMs
Authors: Yida Yin, Zekai Wang, Yuvan Sharma, Dantong Niu, Trevor Darrell, Roei Herzig
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Prediction

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success using in-context learning (ICL) in the language domain. However, leveraging the ICL capabilities within LLMs to directly predict robot actions remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce RoboPrompt, a framework that enables off-the-shelf text-only LLMs to directly predict robot actions through ICL without training. Our approach first heuristically identifies keyframes that capture important moments from an episode. Next, we extract end-effector actions from these keyframes as well as the estimated initial object poses, and both are converted into textual descriptions. Finally, we construct a structured template to form ICL demonstrations from these textual descriptions and a task instruction. This enables an LLM to directly predict robot actions at test time. Through extensive experiments and analysis, RoboPrompt shows stronger performance over zero-shot and ICL baselines in simulated and real-world settings. Our project page is available at https://davidyyd.github.io/roboprompt.
Comparative Analysis of Extrinsic Factors for NER in French
Authors: Grace Yang, Zhiyi Li, Yadong Liu, Jungyeul Park
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Named entity recognition (NER) is a crucial task that aims to identify structured information, which is often replete with complex, technical terms and a high degree of variability. Accurate and reliable NER can facilitate the extraction and analysis of important information. However, NER for other than English is challenging due to limited data availability, as the high expertise, time, and expenses are required to annotate its data. In this paper, by using the limited data, we explore various factors including model structure, corpus annotation scheme and data augmentation techniques to improve the performance of a NER model for French. Our experiments demonstrate that these approaches can significantly improve the model's F1 score from original CRF score of 62.41 to 79.39. Our findings suggest that considering different extrinsic factors and combining these techniques is a promising approach for improving NER performance where the size of data is limited.
WorldMedQA-V: a multilingual, multimodal medical examination dataset for multimodal language models evaluation
Authors: João Matos, Shan Chen, Siena Placino, Yingya Li, Juan Carlos Climent Pardo, Daphna Idan, Takeshi Tohyama, David Restrepo, Luis F. Nakayama, Jose M. M. Pascual-Leone, Guergana Savova, Hugo Aerts, Leo A. Celi, A. Ian Wong, Danielle S. Bitterman, Jack Gallifant
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Fairness, Multiple-choice

Multimodal/vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly being deployed in healthcare settings worldwide, necessitating robust benchmarks to ensure their safety, efficacy, and fairness. Multiple-choice question and answer (QA) datasets derived from national medical examinations have long served as valuable evaluation tools, but existing datasets are largely text-only and available in a limited subset of languages and countries. To address these challenges, we present WorldMedQA-V, an updated multilingual, multimodal benchmarking dataset designed to evaluate VLMs in healthcare. WorldMedQA-V includes 568 labeled multiple-choice QAs paired with 568 medical images from four countries (Brazil, Israel, Japan, and Spain), covering original languages and validated English translations by native clinicians, respectively. Baseline performance for common open- and closed-source models are provided in the local language and English translations, and with and without images provided to the model. The WorldMedQA-V benchmark aims to better match AI systems to the diverse healthcare environments in which they are deployed, fostering more equitable, effective, and representative applications.
Building Better: Avoiding Pitfalls in Developing Language Resources when Data is Scarce
Authors: Nedjma Ousidhoum, Meriem Beloucif, Saif M. Mohammad
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

Language is a form of symbolic capital that affects people's lives in many ways (Bourdieu1977,1991). As a powerful means of communication, it reflects identities, cultures, traditions, and societies more broadly. Therefore, data in a given language should be regarded as more than just a collection of tokens. Rigorous data collection and labeling practices are essential for developing more human-centered and socially aware technologies. Although there has been growing interest in under-resourced languages within the NLP community, work in this area faces unique challenges, such as data scarcity and limited access to qualified annotators. In this paper, we collect feedback from individuals directly involved in and impacted by NLP artefacts for medium- and low-resource languages. We conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses of their responses and highlight key issues related to: (1) data quality, including linguistic and cultural appropriateness; and (2) the ethics of common annotation practices, such as the misuse of participatory research. Based on these findings, we make several recommendations for creating high-quality language artefacts that reflect the cultural milieu of their speakers, while also respecting the dignity and labor of data workers.
From Measurement Instruments to Data: Leveraging Theory-Driven Synthetic Training Data for Classifying Social Constructs
Authors: Lukas Birkenmaier, Matthias Roth, Indira Sen
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, text-classification, Text Classification, Topic Classification

Computational text classification is a challenging task, especially for multi-dimensional social constructs. Recently, there has been increasing discussion that synthetic training data could enhance classification by offering examples of how these constructs are represented in texts. In this paper, we systematically examine the potential of theory-driven synthetic training data for improving the measurement of social constructs. In particular, we explore how researchers can transfer established knowledge from measurement instruments in the social sciences, such as survey scales or annotation codebooks, into theory-driven generation of synthetic data. Using two studies on measuring sexism and political topics, we assess the added value of synthetic training data for fine-tuning text classification models. Although the results of the sexism study were less promising, our findings demonstrate that synthetic data can be highly effective in reducing the need for labeled data in political topic classification. With only a minimal drop in performance, synthetic data allows for substituting large amounts of labeled data. Furthermore, theory-driven synthetic data performed markedly better than data generated without conceptual information in mind.
Parsing Akkadian Verbs with Prolog
Authors: Aaron Macks
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00

This paper describes a parsing/generation system for finite verbal forms in Akkadian, with the possible addition of suffixes, implemented in Prolog. The work described provides the framework and engine to interpret the D, N, and G stems along with accusative, dative and ventive endings.
Not All Votes Count! Programs as Verifiers Improve Self-Consistency of Language Models for Math Reasoning
Authors: Vernon Y. H. Toh, Deepanway Ghosal, Soujanya Poria
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: All, GSM8K, Math, Mathematical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing competence in solving mathematical reasoning problems. However, many open-source LLMs still struggle with errors in calculation and semantic understanding during intermediate reasoning steps. In this work, we introduce Prove, a simple yet effective framework that leverages translated programs derived from natural language solutions as a verification mechanism to filter out potentially incorrect reasoning paths before aggregating final answers. Unlike vanilla majority voting, our approach filters out solutions whose corresponding program output is inconsistent with the generated solution, aggregating only those that pass verification. We conducted extensive experiments using 13 open-source LLMs from various model families and sizes, ranging from 0.5B to 13B parameters, across eight mathematical benchmarks. Our results show that Prove consistently outperforms vanilla majority voting as a heuristic for solving mathematical reasoning tasks across all model sizes and datasets, achieving improvements of up to 18% on GSM8K and 8% on MATH-500. Our codes are available at https://github.com/declare-lab/prove.
CCSBench: Evaluating Compositional Controllability in LLMs for Scientific Document Summarization
Authors: Yixi Ding, Jiaying Wu, Tongyao Zhu, Yanxia Qin, Qian Liu, Min-Yen Kan
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Summarization, Scientific Document Summarization

To broaden the dissemination of scientific knowledge to diverse audiences, scientific document summarization must simultaneously control multiple attributes such as length and empirical focus. However, existing research typically focuses on controlling single attributes, leaving the compositional control of multiple attributes underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce CCSBench, a benchmark for compositional controllable summarization in the scientific domain. Our benchmark enables fine-grained control over both explicit attributes (e.g., length), which are objective and straightforward, and implicit attributes (e.g., empirical focus), which are more subjective and conceptual. We conduct extensive experiments on GPT-4, LLaMA2, and other popular LLMs under various settings. Our findings reveal significant limitations in large language models' ability to balance trade-offs between control attributes, especially implicit ones that require deeper understanding and abstract reasoning.
On the Risk of Evidence Pollution for Malicious Social Text Detection in the Era of LLMs
Authors: Herun Wan, Minnan Luo, Zhixiong Su, Guang Dai, Xiang Zhao
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts, Text Detection

Evidence-enhanced detectors present remarkable abilities in identifying malicious social text with related evidence. However, the rise of large language models (LLMs) brings potential risks of evidence pollution to confuse detectors. This paper explores how to manipulate evidence, simulating potential misuse scenarios including basic pollution, and rephrasing or generating evidence by LLMs. To mitigate its negative impact, we propose three defense strategies from both the data and model sides, including machine-generated text detection, a mixture of experts, and parameter updating. Extensive experiments on four malicious social text detection tasks with ten datasets present that evidence pollution, especially the generate strategy, significantly compromises existing detectors. On the other hand, the defense strategies could mitigate evidence pollution, but they faced limitations for practical employment, such as the need for annotated data and huge inference costs. Further analysis illustrates that polluted evidence is of high quality, would compromise the model calibration, and could ensemble to amplify the negative impact.
Can We Reverse In-Context Knowledge Edits?
Authors: Paul Youssef, Zhixue Zhao, Jörg Schlötterer, Christin Seifert
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: knowledge editing, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Misinformation

In-context knowledge editing (IKE) enables efficient modification of large language model (LLM) outputs without parameter changes and at zero-cost. However, it can be misused to manipulate responses opaquely, e.g., insert misinformation or offensive content. Such malicious interventions could be incorporated into high-level wrapped APIs where the final input prompt is not shown to end-users. To address this issue, we investigate the detection and reversal of IKE-edits. First, we demonstrate that IKE-edits can be detected with high accuracy (F1 > 80\%) using only the top-10 output probabilities of the next token, even in a black-box setting, e.g. proprietary LLMs with limited output information. Further, we introduce the novel task of reversing IKE-edits using specially tuned reversal tokens. We explore using both continuous and discrete reversal tokens, achieving over 80\% accuracy in recovering original, unedited outputs across multiple LLMs. Our continuous reversal tokens prove particularly effective, with minimal impact on unedited prompts. Through analysis of output distributions, attention patterns, and token rankings, we provide insights into IKE's effects on LLMs and how reversal tokens mitigate them. This work represents a significant step towards enhancing LLM resilience against potential misuse of in-context editing, improving their transparency and trustworthiness.
MedAide: Towards an Omni Medical Aide via Specialized LLM-based Multi-Agent Collaboration
Authors: Jinjie Wei, Dingkang Yang, Yanshu Li, Qingyao Xu, Zhaoyu Chen, Mingcheng Li, Yue Jiang, Xiaolu Hou, Lihua Zhang
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven interactive systems currently show potential promise in healthcare domains. Despite their remarkable capabilities, LLMs typically lack personalized recommendations and diagnosis analysis in sophisticated medical applications, causing hallucinations and performance bottlenecks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes MedAide, an LLM-based omni medical multi-agent collaboration framework for specialized healthcare services. Specifically, MedAide first performs query rewriting through retrieval-augmented generation to accomplish accurate medical intent understanding. Immediately, we devise a contextual encoder to obtain intent prototype embeddings, which are used to recognize fine-grained intents by similarity matching. According to the intent relevance, the activated agents collaborate effectively to provide integrated decision analysis. Extensive experiments are conducted on four medical benchmarks with composite intents. Experimental results from automated metrics and expert doctor evaluations show that MedAide outperforms current LLMs and improves their medical proficiency and strategic reasoning.
FiRST: Finetuning Router-Selective Transformers for Input-Adaptive Latency Reduction
Authors: Akriti Jain, Saransh Sharma, Koyel Mukherjee, Soumyabrata Pal
Date: 2024-10-16 00:00:00

Auto-regressive Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across different domains such as vision and language processing. However, due to sequential processing through a stack of transformer layers, autoregressive decoding faces significant computation/latency challenges, particularly in resource-constrained environments like mobile and edge devices. Existing approaches in literature that aim to improve latency via skipping layers have two distinct flavors - 1) Early exit, and 2) Input-agnostic heuristics where tokens exit at pre-determined layers irrespective of input sequence. Both the above strategies have limitations - the former cannot be applied to handle KV Caching necessary for speed-ups in modern framework and the latter does not capture the variation in layer importance across tasks or more generally, across input sequences. To address both limitations, we propose FiRST, an algorithm that reduces inference latency by using layer-specific routers to select a subset of transformer layers adaptively for each input sequence - the prompt (during the prefill stage) decides which layers will be skipped during decoding. FiRST preserves compatibility with KV caching enabling faster inference while being quality-aware. FiRST is model-agnostic and can be easily enabled on any pre-trained LLM. Our approach reveals that input adaptivity is critical - indeed, different task-specific middle layers play a crucial role in evolving hidden representations depending on tasks. Extensive experiments show that FiRST significantly reduces latency while outperforming other layer selection strategies in quality metics. It retains competitive performance to base model (without layer skipping) and in some cases, even improves upon it. FiRST is thus a promising and efficient solution for LLM deployment in low-resource environments.