Oceania
Adversarial Training: A Survey
Zhao, Mengnan, Zhang, Lihe, Ye, Jingwen, Lu, Huchuan, Yin, Baocai, Wang, Xinchao
Adversarial training (AT) refers to integrating adversarial examples -- inputs altered with imperceptible perturbations that can significantly impact model predictions -- into the training process. Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of AT in improving the robustness of deep neural networks against diverse adversarial attacks. However, a comprehensive overview of these developments is still missing. This survey addresses this gap by reviewing a broad range of recent and representative studies. Specifically, we first describe the implementation procedures and practical applications of AT, followed by a comprehensive review of AT techniques from three perspectives: data enhancement, network design, and training configurations. Lastly, we discuss common challenges in AT and propose several promising directions for future research.
Fine-tuning foundational models to code diagnoses from veterinary health records
Boguslav, Mayla R., Kiehl, Adam, Kott, David, Strecker, G. Joseph, Webb, Tracy, Saklou, Nadia, Ward, Terri, Kirby, Michael
Veterinary medical records represent a large data resource for application to veterinary and One Health clinical research efforts. Use of the data is limited by interoperability challenges including inconsistent data formats and data siloing. Clinical coding using standardized medical terminologies enhances the quality of medical records and facilitates their interoperability with veterinary and human health records from other sites. Previous studies, such as DeepTag and VetTag, evaluated the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automate veterinary diagnosis coding, employing long short-term memory (LSTM) and transformer models to infer a subset of Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) diagnosis codes from free-text clinical notes. This study expands on these efforts by incorporating all 7,739 distinct SNOMED-CT diagnosis codes recognized by the Colorado State University (CSU) Veterinary Teaching Hospital (VTH) and by leveraging the increasing availability of pre-trained large language models (LLMs). Ten freely-available pre-trained LLMs were fine-tuned on the free-text notes from 246,473 manually-coded veterinary patient visits included in the CSU VTH's electronic health records (EHRs), which resulted in superior performance relative to previous efforts. The most accurate results were obtained when expansive labeled data were used to fine-tune relatively large clinical LLMs, but the study also showed that comparable results can be obtained using more limited resources and non-clinical LLMs. The results of this study contribute to the improvement of the quality of veterinary EHRs by investigating accessible methods for automated coding and support both animal and human health research by paving the way for more integrated and comprehensive health databases that span species and institutions.
Pathologist-like explainable AI for interpretable Gleason grading in prostate cancer
Mittmann, Gesa, Laiouar-Pedari, Sara, Mehrtens, Hendrik A., Haggenmรผller, Sarah, Bucher, Tabea-Clara, Chanda, Tirtha, Gaisa, Nadine T., Wagner, Mathias, Klamminger, Gilbert Georg, Rau, Tilman T., Neppl, Christina, Compรฉrat, Eva Maria, Gocht, Andreas, Hรคmmerle, Monika, Rupp, Niels J., Westhoff, Jula, Krรผcken, Irene, Seidl, Maximillian, Schรผrch, Christian M., Bauer, Marcus, Solass, Wiebke, Tam, Yu Chun, Weber, Florian, Grobholz, Rainer, Augustyniak, Jaroslaw, Kalinski, Thomas, Hรถrner, Christian, Mertz, Kirsten D., Dรถring, Constanze, Erbersdobler, Andreas, Deubler, Gabriele, Bremmer, Felix, Sommer, Ulrich, Brodhun, Michael, Griffin, Jon, Lenon, Maria Sarah L., Trpkov, Kiril, Cheng, Liang, Chen, Fei, Levi, Angelique, Cai, Guoping, Nguyen, Tri Q., Amin, Ali, Cimadamore, Alessia, Shabaik, Ahmed, Manucha, Varsha, Ahmad, Nazeel, Messias, Nidia, Sanguedolce, Francesca, Taheri, Diana, Baraban, Ezra, Jia, Liwei, Shah, Rajal B., Siadat, Farshid, Swarbrick, Nicole, Park, Kyung, Hassan, Oudai, Sakhaie, Siamak, Downes, Michelle R., Miyamoto, Hiroshi, Williamson, Sean R., Holland-Letz, Tim, Schneider, Carolin V., Kather, Jakob Nikolas, Tolkach, Yuri, Brinker, Titus J.
The aggressiveness of prostate cancer, the most common cancer in men worldwide, is primarily assessed based on histopathological data using the Gleason scoring system. While artificial intelligence (AI) has shown promise in accurately predicting Gleason scores, these predictions often lack inherent explainability, potentially leading to distrust in human-machine interactions. To address this issue, we introduce a novel dataset of 1,015 tissue microarray core images, annotated by an international group of 54 pathologists. The annotations provide detailed localized pattern descriptions for Gleason grading in line with international guidelines. Utilizing this dataset, we develop an inherently explainable AI system based on a U-Net architecture that provides predictions leveraging pathologists' terminology. This approach circumvents post-hoc explainability methods while maintaining or exceeding the performance of methods trained directly for Gleason pattern segmentation (Dice score: 0.713 $\pm$ 0.003 trained on explanations vs. 0.691 $\pm$ 0.010 trained on Gleason patterns). By employing soft labels during training, we capture the intrinsic uncertainty in the data, yielding strong results in Gleason pattern segmentation even in the context of high interobserver variability. With the release of this dataset, we aim to encourage further research into segmentation in medical tasks with high levels of subjectivity and to advance the understanding of pathologists' reasoning processes.
TAGExplainer: Narrating Graph Explanations for Text-Attributed Graph Learning Models
Pan, Bo, Xiong, Zhen, Wu, Guanchen, Zhang, Zheng, Zhang, Yifei, Zhao, Liang
Representation learning of Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) has garnered significant attention due to its applications in various domains, including recommendation systems and social networks. Despite advancements in TAG learning methodologies, challenges remain in explainability due to the black-box nature of existing TAG representation learning models. This paper presents TAGExplainer, the first method designed to generate natural language explanations for TAG learning. TAGExplainer employs a generative language model that maps input-output pairs to explanations reflecting the model's decision-making process. To address the lack of annotated ground truth explanations in real-world scenarios, we propose first generating pseudo-labels that capture the model's decisions from saliency-based explanations, then the pseudo-label generator is iteratively trained based on three training objectives focusing on faithfulness and brevity via Expert Iteration, to improve the quality of generated pseudo-labels. The high-quality pseudo-labels are finally utilized to train an end-to-end explanation generator model. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of TAGExplainer in producing faithful and concise natural language explanations.
Detective who stole 400k of seized drugs jailed
A "cocaine addicted" police officer who was found to be stealing drugs from an evidence store after he accidentally dropped a bag of white powder at his daughter's school has been jailed. Andrew Talbot, at the time a Greater Manchester Police detective, had taken just under 4kg (9lb) of cocaine worth almost 400,000 from police property rooms between 2018 and 2020. He also used the force's computer systems to find a drug dealer to help him sell the drugs on the streets of Manchester. The 54-year-old was found guilty of supplying the drug and misconduct in public office and sentenced to 19 years in jail at Liverpool Crown Court.GMPThe detective stole drugs from Greater Manchester's Police evidence rooms Sentencing him on Friday, Judge Neil Flewitt KC said Talbot had deceived colleagues to put a "significant" quantity of cocaine back into circulation as a result of his "addiction and greed". The investigation into Talbot by GMP's anti-corruption unit began in February 2020 after he dropped a small bag of cocaine outside his daughter's primary school.
Robot Talk Episode 94 โ Esyin Chew
Esyin Chew is the Director of the EUREKA Robotics Centre, one of 11 specialist robotics centres in the UK, impacting underprivileged communities with over 120 humanoid robots. She has led million-pound government or industrial-funded global projects across the UK, EU, Australia, Malaysia, China and Indonesia, including the British Council award-winning Global PIE programme for Women in STEAM-H. Esyin has impacted numerous underprivileged communities, particularly girls and women in education and healthcare sectors, refugees and Orang Asli (Indigenous people).
Critical Questions Generation: Motivation and Challenges
Figueras, Blanca Calvo, Agerri, Rodrigo
The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought impressive performances on mitigation strategies against misinformation, such as counterargument generation. However, LLMs are still seriously hindered by outdated knowledge and by their tendency to generate hallucinated content. In order to circumvent these issues, we propose a new task, namely, Critical Questions Generation, consisting of processing an argumentative text to generate the critical questions (CQs) raised by it. In argumentation theory CQs are tools designed to lay bare the blind spots of an argument by pointing at the information it could be missing. Thus, instead of trying to deploy LLMs to produce knowledgeable and relevant counterarguments, we use them to question arguments, without requiring any external knowledge. Research on CQs Generation using LLMs requires a reference dataset for large scale experimentation. Thus, in this work we investigate two complementary methods to create such a resource: (i) instantiating CQs templates as defined by Walton's argumentation theory and (ii), using LLMs as CQs generators. By doing so, we contribute with a procedure to establish what is a valid CQ and conclude that, while LLMs are reasonable CQ generators, they still have a wide margin for improvement in this task.
Tell me what I need to know: Exploring LLM-based (Personalized) Abstractive Multi-Source Meeting Summarization
Kirstein, Frederic, Ruas, Terry, Kratel, Robert, Gipp, Bela
Meeting summarization is crucial in digital communication, but existing solutions struggle with salience identification to generate personalized, workable summaries, and context understanding to fully comprehend the meetings' content. Previous attempts to address these issues by considering related supplementary resources (e.g., presentation slides) alongside transcripts are hindered by models' limited context sizes and handling the additional complexities of the multi-source tasks, such as identifying relevant information in additional files and seamlessly aligning it with the meeting content. This work explores multi-source meeting summarization considering supplementary materials through a three-stage large language model approach: identifying transcript passages needing additional context, inferring relevant details from supplementary materials and inserting them into the transcript, and generating a summary from this enriched transcript. Our multi-source approach enhances model understanding, increasing summary relevance by ~9% and producing more content-rich outputs. We introduce a personalization protocol that extracts participant characteristics and tailors summaries accordingly, improving informativeness by ~10%. This work further provides insights on performance-cost trade-offs across four leading model families, including edge-device capable options. Our approach can be extended to similar complex generative tasks benefitting from additional resources and personalization, such as dialogue systems and action planning.
SudoLM: Learning Access Control of Parametric Knowledge with Authorization Alignment
Liu, Qin, Wang, Fei, Xiao, Chaowei, Chen, Muhao
Existing preference alignment is a one-size-fits-all alignment mechanism, where the part of the large language model (LLM) parametric knowledge with non-preferred features is uniformly blocked to all the users. However, this part of knowledge can be useful to advanced users whose expertise qualifies them to handle these information. The one-size-fits-all alignment mechanism undermines LLM's utility for these qualified users. To address this problem, we propose SudoLM, a framework that lets LLMs learn access control over specific parametric knowledge for users with different credentials via authorization alignment. SudoLM allows authorized users to unlock their access to all the parametric knowledge with an assigned SUDO key while blocking access to non-qualified users. Experiments on two application scenarios demonstrate that SudoLM effectively controls the user's access to the parametric knowledge and maintains its general utility.
Large Language Models Are Overparameterized Text Encoders
K, Thennal D, Fischer, Tim, Biemann, Chris
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance as text embedding models when finetuned with supervised contrastive training. However, their large size balloons inference time and memory requirements. In this paper, we show that by pruning the last $p\%$ layers of an LLM before supervised training for only 1000 steps, we can achieve a proportional reduction in memory and inference time. We evaluate four different state-of-the-art LLMs on text embedding tasks and find that our method can prune up to 30\% of layers with negligible impact on performance and up to 80\% with only a modest drop. With only three lines of code, our method is easily implemented in any pipeline for transforming LLMs to text encoders. We also propose $\text{L}^3 \text{Prune}$, a novel layer-pruning strategy based on the model's initial loss that provides two optimal pruning configurations: a large variant with negligible performance loss and a small variant for resource-constrained settings. On average, the large variant prunes 21\% of the parameters with a $-0.3$ performance drop, and the small variant only suffers from a $-5.1$ decrease while pruning 74\% of the model. We consider these results strong evidence that LLMs are overparameterized for text embedding tasks, and can be easily pruned.