pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Comparative Study of Recent Large Language Models on Generating Hospital Discharge Summaries for Lung Cancer Patients
Authors: Yiming Li, Fang Li, Kirk Roberts, Licong Cui, Cui Tao, Hua Xu
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Generating discharge summaries is a crucial yet time-consuming task in clinical practice, essential for conveying pertinent patient information and facilitating continuity of care. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their capability in understanding and summarizing complex medical texts. This research aims to explore how LLMs can alleviate the burden of manual summarization, streamline workflow efficiencies, and support informed decision-making in healthcare settings. Clinical notes from a cohort of 1,099 lung cancer patients were utilized, with a subset of 50 patients for testing purposes, and 102 patients used for model fine-tuning. This study evaluates the performance of multiple LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, and LLaMA 3 8b, in generating discharge summaries. Evaluation metrics included token-level analysis (BLEU, ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L) and semantic similarity scores between model-generated summaries and physician-written gold standards. LLaMA 3 8b was further tested on clinical notes of varying lengths to examine the stability of its performance. The study found notable variations in summarization capabilities among LLMs. GPT-4o and fine-tuned LLaMA 3 demonstrated superior token-level evaluation metrics, while LLaMA 3 consistently produced concise summaries across different input lengths. Semantic similarity scores indicated GPT-4o and LLaMA 3 as leading models in capturing clinical relevance. This study contributes insights into the efficacy of LLMs for generating discharge summaries, highlighting LLaMA 3's robust performance in maintaining clarity and relevance across varying clinical contexts. These findings underscore the potential of automated summarization tools to enhance documentation precision and efficiency, ultimately improving patient care and operational capability in healthcare settings.
The Root Shapes the Fruit: On the Persistence of Gender-Exclusive Harms in Aligned Language Models
Authors: Anaelia Ovalle, Krunoslav Lehman Pavasovic, Louis Martin, Luke Zettlemoyer, Eric Michael Smith, Kai-Wei Chang, Adina Williams, Levent Sagun
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00

Natural-language assistants are designed to provide users with helpful responses while avoiding harmful outputs, largely achieved through alignment to human preferences. Yet there is limited understanding of whether alignment techniques may inadvertently perpetuate or even amplify harmful biases inherited from their pre-aligned base models. This issue is compounded by the choice of bias evaluation benchmarks in popular preference-finetuned models, which predominantly focus on dominant social categories, such as binary gender, thereby limiting insights into biases affecting underrepresented groups. Towards addressing this gap, we center transgender, nonbinary, and other gender-diverse identities to investigate how alignment procedures interact with pre-existing gender-diverse bias in LLMs. Our key contributions include: 1) a comprehensive survey of bias evaluation modalities across leading preference-finetuned LLMs, highlighting critical gaps in gender-diverse representation, 2) systematic evaluation of gender-diverse biases across 16 models spanning Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) stages, uncovering harms popular bias benchmarks fail to detect, and 3) a flexible framework for measuring harmful biases in implicit reward signals applicable to other social contexts. Our findings reveal that DPO-aligned models are particularly sensitive to supervised finetuning (SFT), and can amplify two forms of real-world gender-diverse harms from their base models: stigmatization and gender non-affirmative language. We conclude with recommendations tailored to DPO and broader alignment practices, advocating for the adoption of community-informed bias evaluation frameworks to more effectively identify and address underrepresented harms in LLMs.
From Medprompt to o1: Exploration of Run-Time Strategies for Medical Challenge Problems and Beyond
Authors: Harsha Nori, Naoto Usuyama, Nicholas King, Scott Mayer McKinney, Xavier Fernandes, Sheng Zhang, Eric Horvitz
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Prompt Engineering

Run-time steering strategies like Medprompt are valuable for guiding large language models (LLMs) to top performance on challenging tasks. Medprompt demonstrates that a general LLM can be focused to deliver state-of-the-art performance on specialized domains like medicine by using a prompt to elicit a run-time strategy involving chain of thought reasoning and ensembling. OpenAI's o1-preview model represents a new paradigm, where a model is designed to do run-time reasoning before generating final responses. We seek to understand the behavior of o1-preview on a diverse set of medical challenge problem benchmarks. Following on the Medprompt study with GPT-4, we systematically evaluate the o1-preview model across various medical benchmarks. Notably, even without prompting techniques, o1-preview largely outperforms the GPT-4 series with Medprompt. We further systematically study the efficacy of classic prompt engineering strategies, as represented by Medprompt, within the new paradigm of reasoning models. We found that few-shot prompting hinders o1's performance, suggesting that in-context learning may no longer be an effective steering approach for reasoning-native models. While ensembling remains viable, it is resource-intensive and requires careful cost-performance optimization. Our cost and accuracy analysis across run-time strategies reveals a Pareto frontier, with GPT-4o representing a more affordable option and o1-preview achieving state-of-the-art performance at higher cost. Although o1-preview offers top performance, GPT-4o with steering strategies like Medprompt retains value in specific contexts. Moreover, we note that the o1-preview model has reached near-saturation on many existing medical benchmarks, underscoring the need for new, challenging benchmarks. We close with reflections on general directions for inference-time computation with LLMs.
Learning to Write Rationally: How Information Is Distributed in Non-Native Speakers' Essays
Authors: Zixin Tang, Janet G. van Hell
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00

People tend to distribute information evenly in language production for better and clearer communication. In this study, we compared essays written by second language learners with various native language (L1) backgrounds to investigate how they distribute information in their non-native language (L2) production. Analyses of surprisal and constancy of entropy rate indicated that writers with higher L2 proficiency can reduce the expected uncertainty of language production while still conveying informative content. However, the uniformity of information distribution showed less variability among different groups of L2 speakers, suggesting that this feature may be universal in L2 essay writing and less affected by L2 writers' variability in L1 background and L2 proficiency.
Uncertainty Quantification for Clinical Outcome Predictions with (Large) Language Models
Authors: Zizhang Chen, Peizhao Li, Xiaomeng Dong, Pengyu Hong
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

To facilitate healthcare delivery, language models (LMs) have significant potential for clinical prediction tasks using electronic health records (EHRs). However, in these high-stakes applications, unreliable decisions can result in high costs due to compromised patient safety and ethical concerns, thus increasing the need for good uncertainty modeling of automated clinical predictions. To address this, we consider the uncertainty quantification of LMs for EHR tasks in white- and black-box settings. We first quantify uncertainty in white-box models, where we can access model parameters and output logits. We show that an effective reduction of model uncertainty can be achieved by using the proposed multi-tasking and ensemble methods in EHRs. Continuing with this idea, we extend our approach to black-box settings, including popular proprietary LMs such as GPT-4. We validate our framework using longitudinal clinical data from more than 6,000 patients in ten clinical prediction tasks. Results show that ensembling methods and multi-task prediction prompts reduce uncertainty across different scenarios. These findings increase the transparency of the model in white-box and black-box settings, thus advancing reliable AI healthcare.
MetRex: A Benchmark for Verilog Code Metric Reasoning Using LLMs
Authors: Manar Abdelatty, Jingxiao Ma, Sherief Reda
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Bug fixing, Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied to various hardware design tasks, including Verilog code generation, EDA tool scripting, and RTL bug fixing. Despite this extensive exploration, LLMs are yet to be used for the task of post-synthesis metric reasoning and estimation of HDL designs. In this paper, we assess the ability of LLMs to reason about post-synthesis metrics of Verilog designs. We introduce MetRex, a large-scale dataset comprising 25,868 Verilog HDL designs and their corresponding post-synthesis metrics, namely area, delay, and static power. MetRex incorporates a Chain of Thought (CoT) template to enhance LLMs' reasoning about these metrics. Extensive experiments show that Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) boosts the LLM's reasoning capabilities on average by 37.0\%, 25.3\%, and 25.7\% on the area, delay, and static power, respectively. While SFT improves performance on our benchmark, it remains far from achieving optimal results, especially on complex problems. Comparing to state-of-the-art regression models, our approach delivers accurate post-synthesis predictions for 17.4\% more designs (within a 5\% error margin), in addition to offering a 1.7x speedup by eliminating the need for pre-processing. This work lays the groundwork for advancing LLM-based Verilog code metric reasoning.
Usefulness of LLMs as an Author Checklist Assistant for Scientific Papers: NeurIPS'24 Experiment
Authors: Alexander Goldberg, Ihsan Ullah, Thanh Gia Hieu Khuong, Benedictus Kent Rachmat, Zhen Xu, Isabelle Guyon, Nihar B. Shah
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) represent a promising, but controversial, tool in aiding scientific peer review. This study evaluates the usefulness of LLMs in a conference setting as a tool for vetting paper submissions against submission standards. We conduct an experiment at the 2024 Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, where 234 papers were voluntarily submitted to an "LLM-based Checklist Assistant." This assistant validates whether papers adhere to the author checklist used by NeurIPS, which includes questions to ensure compliance with research and manuscript preparation standards. Evaluation of the assistant by NeurIPS paper authors suggests that the LLM-based assistant was generally helpful in verifying checklist completion. In post-usage surveys, over 70% of authors found the assistant useful, and 70% indicate that they would revise their papers or checklist responses based on its feedback. While causal attribution to the assistant is not definitive, qualitative evidence suggests that the LLM contributed to improving some submissions. Survey responses and analysis of re-submissions indicate that authors made substantive revisions to their submissions in response to specific feedback from the LLM. The experiment also highlights common issues with LLMs: inaccuracy (20/52) and excessive strictness (14/52) were the most frequent issues flagged by authors. We also conduct experiments to understand potential gaming of the system, which reveal that the assistant could be manipulated to enhance scores through fabricated justifications, highlighting potential vulnerabilities of automated review tools.
SAUCE: Synchronous and Asynchronous User-Customizable Environment for Multi-Agent LLM Interaction
Authors: Shlomo Neuberger, Niv Eckhaus, Uri Berger, Amir Taubenfeld, Gabriel Stanovsky, Ariel Goldstein
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Many human interactions, such as political debates, are carried out in group settings, where there are arbitrarily many participants, each with different views and agendas. To explore such complex social settings, we present SAUCE: a customizable Python platform, allowing researchers to plug-and-play various LLMs participating in discussions on any topic chosen by the user. Our platform takes care of instantiating the models, scheduling their responses, managing the discussion history, and producing a comprehensive output log, all customizable through configuration files, requiring little to no coding skills. A novel feature of SAUCE is our asynchronous communication feature, where models decide when to speak in addition to what to say, thus modeling an important facet of human communication. We show SAUCE's attractiveness in two initial experiments, and invite the community to use it in simulating various group simulations.
Exploring Large Language Models for Specialist-level Oncology Care
Authors: Anil Palepu, Vikram Dhillon, Polly Niravath, Wei-Hung Weng, Preethi Prasad, Khaled Saab, Ryutaro Tanno, Yong Cheng, Hanh Mai, Ethan Burns, Zainub Ajmal, Kavita Kulkarni, Philip Mansfield, Dale Webster, Joelle Barral, Juraj Gottweis, Mike Schaekermann, S. Sara Mahdavi, Vivek Natarajan, Alan Karthikesalingam, Tao Tu
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Clinical Knowledge, Decision Making, Diagnostic

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in encoding clinical knowledge and responding to complex medical queries with appropriate clinical reasoning. However, their applicability in subspecialist or complex medical settings remains underexplored. In this work, we probe the performance of AMIE, a research conversational diagnostic AI system, in the subspecialist domain of breast oncology care without specific fine-tuning to this challenging domain. To perform this evaluation, we curated a set of 50 synthetic breast cancer vignettes representing a range of treatment-naive and treatment-refractory cases and mirroring the key information available to a multidisciplinary tumor board for decision-making (openly released with this work). We developed a detailed clinical rubric for evaluating management plans, including axes such as the quality of case summarization, safety of the proposed care plan, and recommendations for chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery and hormonal therapy. To improve performance, we enhanced AMIE with the inference-time ability to perform web search retrieval to gather relevant and up-to-date clinical knowledge and refine its responses with a multi-stage self-critique pipeline. We compare response quality of AMIE with internal medicine trainees, oncology fellows, and general oncology attendings under both automated and specialist clinician evaluations. In our evaluations, AMIE outperformed trainees and fellows demonstrating the potential of the system in this challenging and important domain. We further demonstrate through qualitative examples, how systems such as AMIE might facilitate conversational interactions to assist clinicians in their decision making. However, AMIE's performance was overall inferior to attending oncologists suggesting that further research is needed prior to consideration of prospective uses.
A Surrogate Model for Quay Crane Scheduling Problem
Authors: Kikun Park, Hyerim Bae
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Scheduling

In ports, a variety of tasks are carried out, and scheduling these tasks is crucial due to its significant impact on productivity, making the generation of precise plans essential. This study proposes a method to solve the Quay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP), a representative task scheduling problem in ports known to be NP-Hard, more quickly and accurately. First, the study suggests a method to create more accurate work plans for Quay Cranes (QCs) by learning from actual port data to accurately predict the working speed of QCs. Next, a Surrogate Model is proposed by combining a Machine Learning (ML) model with a Genetic Algorithm (GA), which is widely used to solve complex optimization problems, enabling faster and more precise exploration of solutions. Unlike methods that use fixed-dimensional chromosome encoding, the proposed methodology can provide solutions for encodings of various dimensions. To validate the performance of the newly proposed methodology, comparative experiments were conducted, demonstrating faster search speeds and improved fitness scores. The method proposed in this study can be applied not only to QCSP but also to various NP-Hard problems, and it opens up possibilities for the further development of advanced search algorithms by combining heuristic algorithms with ML models.
Multilingual hierarchical classification of job advertisements for job vacancy statistics
Authors: Maciej Beręsewicz, Marek Wydmuch, Herman Cherniaiev, Robert Pater
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00

The goal of this paper is to develop a multilingual classifier and conditional probability estimator of occupation codes for online job advertisements according in accordance with the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) extended with the Polish Classification of Occupations and Specializations (KZiS), which is analogous to the European Classification of Occupations. In this paper, we utilise a range of data sources, including a novel one, namely the Central Job Offers Database, which is a register of all vacancies submitted to Public Employment Offices. Their staff members code the vacancies according to the ISCO and KZiS. A hierarchical multi-class classifier has been developed based on the transformer architecture. The classifier begins by encoding the jobs found in advertisements to the widest 1-digit occupational group, and then narrows the assignment to a 6-digit occupation code. We show that incorporation of the hierarchical structure of occupations improves prediction accuracy by 1-2 percentage points, particularly for the hand-coded online job advertisements. Finally, a bilingual (Polish and English) and multilingual (24 languages) model is developed based on data translated using closed and open-source software. The open-source software is provided for the benefit of the official statistics community, with a particular focus on international comparability.
Near-Optimal and Tractable Estimation under Shift-Invariance
Authors: Dmitrii M. Ostrovskii
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: All

How hard is it to estimate a discrete-time signal $(x_{1}, ..., x_{n}) \in \mathbb{C}^n$ satisfying an unknown linear recurrence relation of order $s$ and observed in i.i.d. complex Gaussian noise? The class of all such signals is parametric but extremely rich: it contains all exponential polynomials over $\mathbb{C}$ with total degree $s$, including harmonic oscillations with $s$ arbitrary frequencies. Geometrically, this class corresponds to the projection onto $\mathbb{C}^{n}$ of the union of all shift-invariant subspaces of $\mathbb{C}^\mathbb{Z}$ of dimension $s$. We show that the statistical complexity of this class, as measured by the squared minimax radius of the $(1-\delta)$-confidence $\ell_2$-ball, is nearly the same as for the class of $s$-sparse signals, namely $O\left(s\log(en) + \log(\delta^{-1})\right) \cdot \log^2(es) \cdot \log(en/s).$ Moreover, the corresponding near-minimax estimator is tractable, and it can be used to build a test statistic with a near-minimax detection threshold in the associated detection problem. These statistical results rest upon an approximation-theoretic one: we show that finite-dimensional shift-invariant subspaces admit compactly supported reproducing kernels whose Fourier spectra have nearly the smallest possible $\ell_p$-norms, for all $p \in [1,+\infty]$ at once.
Reproducible Hybrid Time-Travel Retrieval in Evolving Corpora
Authors: Moritz Staudinger, Florina Piroi, Andreas Rauber
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

There are settings in which reproducibility of ranked lists is desirable, such as when extracting a subset of an evolving document corpus for downstream research tasks or in domains such as patent retrieval or in medical systematic reviews, with high reproducibility expectations. However, as global term statistics change when documents change or are added to a corpus, queries using typical ranked retrieval models are not even reproducible for the parts of the document corpus that have not changed. Thus, Boolean retrieval frequently remains the mechanism of choice in such settings. We present a hybrid retrieval system combining Lucene for fast retrieval with a column-store-based retrieval system maintaining a versioned and time-stamped index. The latter component allows re-execution of previously posed queries resulting in the same ranked list and further allows for time-travel queries over evolving collection, as web archives, while maintaining the original ranking. Thus, retrieval results in evolving document collections are fully reproducible even when document collections and thus term statistics change.
Data Fusion of Synthetic Query Variants With Generative Large Language Models
Authors: Timo Breuer
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Considering query variance in information retrieval (IR) experiments is beneficial for retrieval effectiveness. Especially ranking ensembles based on different topically related queries retrieve better results than rankings based on a single query alone. Recently, generative instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) improved on a variety of different tasks in capturing human language. To this end, this work explores the feasibility of using synthetic query variants generated by instruction-tuned LLMs in data fusion experiments. More specifically, we introduce a lightweight, unsupervised, and cost-efficient approach that exploits principled prompting and data fusion techniques. In our experiments, LLMs produce more effective queries when provided with additional context information on the topic. Furthermore, our analysis based on four TREC newswire benchmarks shows that data fusion based on synthetic query variants is significantly better than baselines with single queries and also outperforms pseudo-relevance feedback methods. We publicly share the code and query datasets with the community as resources for follow-up studies.
The Essence of the Essence from the Web:The Metasearch Engine
Authors: Rajender Nath, Satinder Bal
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00

The exponential growth of information source on the web and in turn continuing technological progress of searching the information by using tools like Search Engines gives rise to many problems for the user to know which tool is best for their query and which tool is not. At this time Metasearch Engine comes into play by reducing the user burden by dispatching queries to multiple search engines in parallel and refining the results of these search engines to give the best out of best by doing superior job on their side. These engines do not own a database of Web pages rather they send search terms to the databases maintained by the search engine companies, get back results from all the search engines queried and then compile the results to be presented to the user. In this paper, we describe the working of a typical metasearch engine and then present a comparative study of traditional search engines and metasearch engines on the basis of different parameters and show how metasearch engines are better than the other search engines.