Developing intelligent pediatric consultation systems offers promising prospects for improving diagnostic efficiency, especially in China, where healthcare resources are scarce. Despite recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for Chinese medicine, their performance is sub-optimal in pediatric applications due to inadequate instruction data and vulnerable training procedures. To address the above issues, this paper builds PedCorpus, a high-quality dataset of over 300,000 multi-task instructions from pediatric textbooks, guidelines, and knowledge graph resources to fulfil diverse diagnostic demands. Upon well-designed PedCorpus, we propose PediatricsGPT, the first Chinese pediatric LLM assistant built on a systematic and robust training pipeline. In the continuous pre-training phase, we introduce a hybrid instruction pre-training mechanism to mitigate the internal-injected knowledge inconsistency of LLMs for medical domain adaptation. Immediately, the full-parameter Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is utilized to incorporate the general medical knowledge schema into the models. After that, we devise a direct following preference optimization to enhance the generation of pediatrician-like humanistic responses. In the parameter-efficient secondary SFT phase, a mixture of universal-specific experts strategy is presented to resolve the competency conflict between medical generalist and pediatric expertise mastery. Extensive results based on the metrics, GPT-4, and doctor evaluations on distinct downstream tasks show that PediatricsGPT consistently outperforms previous Chinese medical LLMs.

Developing intelligent pediatric consultation systems offers promising prospects for improving diagnostic efficiency, especially in China, where healthcare resources are scarce. Despite recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for Chinese medicine, their performance is sub-optimal in pediatric applications due to inadequate instruction data and vulnerable training procedures. To address the above issues, this paper builds PedCorpus, a high-quality dataset of over 300,000 multi-task instructions from pediatric textbooks, guidelines, and knowledge graph resources to fulfil diverse diagnostic demands. Upon well-designed PedCorpus, we propose PediatricsGPT, the first Chinese pediatric LLM assistant built on a systematic and robust training pipeline. In the continuous pre-training phase, we introduce a hybrid instruction pre-training mechanism to mitigate the internal-injected knowledge inconsistency of LLMs for medical domain adaptation. Immediately, the full-parameter Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is utilized to incorporate the general medical knowledge schema into the models. After that, we devise a direct following preference optimization to enhance the generation of pediatrician-like humanistic responses. In the parameter-efficient secondary SFT phase, a mixture of universal-specific experts strategy is presented to resolve the competency conflict between medical generalist and pediatric expertise mastery. Extensive results based on the metrics, GPT-4, and doctor evaluations on distinct downstream tasks show that PediatricsGPT consistently outperforms previous Chinese medical LLMs.

Improving the length extrapolation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge in natural language processing. Many recent efforts have focused on modifying the scaled dot-product attention mechanism, and often introduce scaled temperatures without rigorous theoretical justification. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel approach based on information entropy invariance. We propose two new scaled temperatures to enhance length extrapolation. First, a training-free method InfoScale is designed for dot-product attention, and preserves focus on original tokens during length extrapolation by ensuring information entropy remains consistent. Second, we theoretically analyze the impact of scaling (CosScale) on cosine attention. Experimental data demonstrates that combining InfoScale and CosScale achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GAU-{\alpha} model with a context window extended to 64 times the training length, and outperforms seven existing methods. Our analysis reveals that significantly increasing CosScale approximates windowed attention, and highlights the significance of attention score dilution as a key challenge in long-range context handling. The code and data are available at https://github.com/HT-NEKO/InfoScale.

Shortcut learning refers to the phenomenon where models employ simple, non-robust decision rules in practical tasks, which hinders their generalization and robustness. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) in recent years, an increasing number of studies have shown the impact of shortcut learning on LLMs. This paper provides a novel perspective to review relevant research on shortcut learning in In-Context Learning (ICL). It conducts a detailed exploration of the types of shortcuts in ICL tasks, their causes, available benchmarks, and strategies for mitigating shortcuts. Based on corresponding observations, it summarizes the unresolved issues in existing research and attempts to outline the future research landscape of shortcut learning.

Recent advancements in feature representation and dimension reduction have highlighted their crucial role in enhancing the efficacy of predictive modeling. This work introduces TemporalPaD, a novel end-to-end deep learning framework designed for temporal pattern datasets. TemporalPaD integrates reinforcement learning (RL) with neural networks to achieve concurrent feature representation and feature reduction. The framework consists of three cooperative modules: a Policy Module, a Representation Module, and a Classification Module, structured based on the Actor-Critic (AC) framework. The Policy Module, responsible for dimensionality reduction through RL, functions as the actor, while the Representation Module for feature extraction and the Classification Module collectively serve as the critic. We comprehensively evaluate TemporalPaD using 29 UCI datasets, a well-known benchmark for validating feature reduction algorithms, through 10 independent tests and 10-fold cross-validation. Additionally, given that TemporalPaD is specifically designed for time series data, we apply it to a real-world DNA classification problem involving enhancer category and enhancer strength. The results demonstrate that TemporalPaD is an efficient and effective framework for achieving feature reduction, applicable to both structured data and sequence datasets.

Context-aware emotion recognition (CAER) is a complex and significant task that requires perceiving emotions from various contextual cues. Previous approaches primarily focus on designing sophisticated architectures to extract emotional cues from images. However, their knowledge is confined to specific training datasets and may reflect the subjective emotional biases of the annotators. Furthermore, acquiring large amounts of labeled data is often challenging in real-world applications. In this paper, we systematically explore the potential of leveraging Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to empower the CAER task from three paradigms: 1) We fine-tune LVLMs on two CAER datasets, which is the most common way to transfer large models to downstream tasks. 2) We design zero-shot and few-shot patterns to evaluate the performance of LVLMs in scenarios with limited data or even completely unseen. In this case, a training-free framework is proposed to fully exploit the In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities of LVLMs. Specifically, we develop an image similarity-based ranking algorithm to retrieve examples; subsequently, the instructions, retrieved examples, and the test example are combined to feed LVLMs to obtain the corresponding sentiment judgment. 3) To leverage the rich knowledge base of LVLMs, we incorporate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) into our framework to enhance the model's reasoning ability and provide interpretable results. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that LVLMs achieve competitive performance in the CAER task across different paradigms. Notably, the superior performance in few-shot settings indicates the feasibility of LVLMs for accomplishing specific tasks without extensive training.

Most fake news detection methods learn latent feature representations based on neural networks, which makes them black boxes to classify a piece of news without giving any justification. Existing explainable systems generate veracity justifications from investigative journalism, which suffer from debunking delayed and low efficiency. Recent studies simply assume that the justification is equivalent to the majority opinions expressed in the wisdom of crowds. However, the opinions typically contain some inaccurate or biased information since the wisdom of crowds is uncensored. To detect fake news from a sea of diverse, crowded and even competing narratives, in this paper, we propose a novel defense-based explainable fake news detection framework. Specifically, we first propose an evidence extraction module to split the wisdom of crowds into two competing parties and respectively detect salient evidences. To gain concise insights from evidences, we then design a prompt-based module that utilizes a large language model to generate justifications by inferring reasons towards two possible veracities. Finally, we propose a defense-based inference module to determine veracity via modeling the defense among these justifications. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of fake news detection and provides high-quality justifications.

Developing intelligent pediatric consultation systems offers promising prospects for improving diagnostic efficiency, especially in China, where healthcare resources are scarce. Despite recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for Chinese medicine, their performance is sub-optimal in pediatric applications due to inadequate instruction data and vulnerable training procedures. To address the above issues, this paper builds PedCorpus, a high-quality dataset of over 300,000 multi-task instructions from pediatric textbooks, guidelines, and knowledge graph resources to fulfil diverse diagnostic demands. Upon well-designed PedCorpus, we propose PediatricsGPT, the first Chinese pediatric LLM assistant built on a systematic and robust training pipeline. In the continuous pre-training phase, we introduce a hybrid instruction pre-training mechanism to mitigate the internal-injected knowledge inconsistency of LLMs for medical domain adaptation. Immediately, the full-parameter Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is utilized to incorporate the general medical knowledge schema into the models. After that, we devise a direct following preference optimization to enhance the generation of pediatrician-like humanistic responses. In the parameter-efficient secondary SFT phase, a mixture of universal-specific experts strategy is presented to resolve the competency conflict between medical generalist and pediatric expertise mastery. Extensive results based on the metrics, GPT-4, and doctor evaluations on distinct doctor downstream tasks show that PediatricsGPT consistently outperforms previous Chinese medical LLMs. Our model and dataset will be open-source for community development.

Large-scale high spatial resolution aboveground biomass (AGB) maps play a crucial role in determining forest carbon stocks and how they are changing, which is instrumental in understanding the global carbon cycle, and implementing policy to mitigate climate change. The advent of the new space-borne LiDAR sensor, NASA's GEDI instrument, provides unparalleled possibilities for the accurate and unbiased estimation of forest AGB at high resolution, particularly in dense and tall forests, where Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and passive optical data exhibit saturation. However, GEDI is a sampling instrument, collecting dispersed footprints, and its data must be combined with that from other continuous cover satellites to create high-resolution maps, using local machine learning methods. In this study, we developed local models to estimate forest AGB from GEDI L2A data, as the models used to create GEDI L4 AGB data incorporated minimal field data from China. We then applied LightGBM and random forest regression to generate wall-to-wall AGB maps at 25 m resolution, using extensive GEDI footprints as well as Sentinel-1 data, ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 and Sentinel-2 optical data. Through a 5-fold cross-validation, LightGBM demonstrated a slightly better performance than Random Forest across two contrasting regions. However, in both regions, the computation speed of LightGBM is substantially faster than that of the random forest model, requiring roughly one-third of the time to compute on the same hardware. Through the validation against field data, the 25 m resolution AGB maps generated using the local models developed in this study exhibited higher accuracy compared to the GEDI L4B AGB data. We found in both regions an increase in error as slope increased. The trained models were tested on nearby but different regions and exhibited good performance.

Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) has become the technology of choice for diagnostic medical imaging, given its lower radiation dose compared to standard CT, despite increasing image noise and potentially affecting diagnostic accuracy. To address this, advanced deep learning-based LDCT denoising algorithms have been developed, primarily using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or Transformer Networks with the Unet architecture. This architecture enhances image detail by integrating feature maps from the encoder and decoder via skip connections. However, current methods often overlook enhancements to the Unet architecture itself, focusing instead on optimizing encoder and decoder structures. This approach can be problematic due to the significant differences in feature map characteristics between the encoder and decoder, where simple fusion strategies may not effectively reconstruct images.In this paper, we introduce WiTUnet, a novel LDCT image denoising method that utilizes nested, dense skip pathways instead of traditional skip connections to improve feature integration. WiTUnet also incorporates a windowed Transformer structure to process images in smaller, non-overlapping segments, reducing computational load. Additionally, the integration of a Local Image Perception Enhancement (LiPe) module in both the encoder and decoder replaces the standard multi-layer perceptron (MLP) in Transformers, enhancing local feature capture and representation. Through extensive experimental comparisons, WiTUnet has demonstrated superior performance over existing methods in key metrics such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity (SSIM), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), significantly improving noise removal and image quality.