South America
QUITO-X: An Information Bottleneck-based Compression Algorithm with Cross-Attention
Wang, Yihang, Huang, Xu, Tian, Bowen, Fan, Yixing, Guo, Jiafeng
Generative LLM have achieved significant success in various industrial tasks and can effectively adapt to vertical domains and downstream tasks through ICL. However, with tasks becoming increasingly complex, the context length required by ICL is also getting longer, and two significant issues arise: (i) The excessively long context leads to high costs and inference delays. (ii) A substantial amount of task-irrelevant information introduced by long contexts exacerbates the "lost in the middle" problem. Recently, compressing prompts by removing tokens according to some metric obtained from some causal language models, such as llama-7b, has emerged as an effective approach to mitigate these issues. However, the metric used by prior method such as self-information or PPL do not fully align with the objective of distinuishing the most important tokens when conditioning on query. In this work, we introduce information bottleneck theory to carefully examine the properties required by the metric. Inspired by this, we use cross-attention in encoder-decoder architecture as a new metric. Our simple method leads to significantly better performance in smaller models with lower latency. We evaluate our method on four datasets: DROP, CoQA, SQuAD, and Quoref. The experimental results show that, while maintaining the same performance, our compression rate can improve by nearly 25% over previous SOTA. Remarkably, in experiments where 25% of the tokens are removed, our model's EM score for answers sometimes even exceeds that of the control group using uncompressed text as context.
Evaluation Framework for AI-driven Molecular Design of Multi-target Drugs: Brain Diseases as a Case Study
Cerveira, Arthur, Kremer, Frederico, Lourenço, Darling de Andrade, Corrêa, Ulisses B
The widespread application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques has significantly influenced the development of new therapeutic agents. These computational methods can be used to design and predict the properties of generated molecules. Multi-target Drug Discovery (MTDD) is an emerging paradigm for discovering drugs against complex disorders that do not respond well to more traditional target-specific treatments, such as central nervous system, immune system, and cardiovascular diseases. Still, there is yet to be an established benchmark suite for assessing the effectiveness of AI tools for designing multi-target compounds. Standardized benchmarks allow for comparing existing techniques and promote rapid research progress. Hence, this work proposes an evaluation framework for molecule generation techniques in MTDD scenarios, considering brain diseases as a case study. Our methodology involves using large language models to select the appropriate molecular targets, gathering and preprocessing the bioassay datasets, training quantitative structure-activity relationship models to predict target modulation, and assessing other essential drug-likeness properties for implementing the benchmarks. Additionally, this work will assess the performance of four deep generative models and evolutionary algorithms over our benchmark suite. In our findings, both evolutionary algorithms and generative models can achieve competitive results across the proposed benchmarks.
MedMAP: Promoting Incomplete Multi-modal Brain Tumor Segmentation with Alignment
Liu, Tianyi, Tan, Zhaorui, Chen, Muyin, Yang, Xi, Jiang, Haochuan, Huang, Kaizhu
Brain tumor segmentation is often based on multiple magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, in clinical practice, certain modalities of MRI may be missing, which presents a more difficult scenario. To cope with this challenge, Knowledge Distillation, Domain Adaption, and Shared Latent Space have emerged as commonly promising strategies. However, recent efforts typically overlook the modality gaps and thus fail to learn important invariant feature representations across different modalities. Such drawback consequently leads to limited performance for missing modality models. To ameliorate these problems, pre-trained models are used in natural visual segmentation tasks to minimize the gaps. However, promising pre-trained models are often unavailable in medical image segmentation tasks. Along this line, in this paper, we propose a novel paradigm that aligns latent features of involved modalities to a well-defined distribution anchor as the substitution of the pre-trained model}. As a major contribution, we prove that our novel training paradigm ensures a tight evidence lower bound, thus theoretically certifying its effectiveness. Extensive experiments on different backbones validate that the proposed paradigm can enable invariant feature representations and produce models with narrowed modality gaps. Models with our alignment paradigm show their superior performance on both BraTS2018 and BraTS2020 datasets.
EqNIO: Subequivariant Neural Inertial Odometry
Jayanth, Royina Karegoudra, Xu, Yinshuang, Wang, Ziyun, Chatzipantazis, Evangelos, Gehrig, Daniel, Daniilidis, Kostas
Neural networks are seeing rapid adoption in purely inertial odometry, where accelerometer and gyroscope measurements from commodity inertial measurement units (IMU) are used to regress displacements and associated uncertainties. They can learn informative displacement priors, which can be directly fused with the raw data with off-the-shelf non-linear filters. Nevertheless, these networks do not consider the physical roto-reflective symmetries inherent in IMU data, leading to the need to memorize the same priors for every possible motion direction, which hinders generalization. In this work, we characterize these symmetries and show that the IMU data and the resulting displacement and covariance transform equivariantly, when rotated around the gravity vector and reflected with respect to arbitrary planes parallel to gravity. We design a neural network that respects these symmetries by design through equivariant processing in three steps: First, it estimates an equivariant gravity-aligned frame from equivariant vectors and invariant scalars derived from IMU data, leveraging expressive linear and non-linear layers tailored to commute with the underlying symmetry transformation. We then map the IMU data into this frame, thereby achieving an invariant canonicalization that can be directly used with off-the-shelf inertial odometry networks. Finally, we map these network outputs back into the original frame, thereby obtaining equivariant covariances and displacements. We demonstrate the generality of our framework by applying it to the filter-based approach based on TLIO, and the end-to-end RONIN architecture, and show better performance on the TLIO, Aria, RIDI and OxIOD datasets than existing methods.
Advances in Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Analysis: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions
Wang, Jun, Mao, Yu, Guan, Nan, Xue, Chun Jason
Whole slide images (WSIs) are gigapixel-scale digital images of H\&E-stained tissue samples widely used in pathology. The substantial size and complexity of WSIs pose unique analytical challenges. Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has emerged as a powerful approach for addressing these challenges, particularly in cancer classification and detection. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and methodologies associated with applying MIL to WSI analysis, including attention mechanisms, pseudo-labeling, transformers, pooling functions, and graph neural networks. Additionally, it explores the potential of MIL in discovering cancer cell morphology, constructing interpretable machine learning models, and quantifying cancer grading. By summarizing the current challenges, methodologies, and potential applications of MIL in WSI analysis, this survey aims to inform researchers about the state of the field and inspire future research directions.
Rethinking Deep Learning: Propagating Information in Neural Networks without Backpropagation and Statistical Optimization
Developing strong AI signifies the arrival of technological singularity, contributing greatly to advancing human civilization and resolving social issues. Neural networks (NNs) and deep learning, which utilize NNs, are expected to lead to strong AI due to their biological neural system-mimicking structures. However, the statistical weight optimization techniques commonly used, such as error backpropagation and loss functions, may hinder the mimicry of neural systems. This study discusses the information propagation capabilities and potential practical applications of NNs as neural system mimicking structures by solving the handwritten character recognition problem in the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) database without using statistical weight optimization techniques like error backpropagation. In this study, the NNs architecture comprises fully connected layers using step functions as activation functions, with 0-15 hidden layers, and no weight updates. The accuracy is calculated by comparing the average output vectors of the training data for each label with the output vectors of the test data, based on vector similarity. The results showed that the maximum accuracy achieved is around 80%. This indicates that NNs can propagate information correctly without using statistical weight optimization. Additionally, the accuracy decreased with an increasing number of hidden layers. This is attributed to the decrease in the variance of the output vectors as the number of hidden layers increases, suggesting that the output data becomes smooth. This study's NNs and accuracy calculation methods are simple and have room for various improvements. Moreover, creating a feedforward NNs that repeatedly cycles through 'input -> processing -> output -> environmental response -> input -> ...' could pave the way for practical software applications.
Moonshine: Distilling Game Content Generators into Steerable Generative Models
Nie, Yuhe, Middleton, Michael, Merino, Tim, Kanagaraja, Nidhushan, Kumar, Ashutosh, Zhuang, Zhan, Togelius, Julian
Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning (PCGML) has enhanced game content creation, yet challenges in controllability and limited training data persist. This study addresses these issues by distilling a constructive PCG algorithm into a controllable PCGML model. We first generate a large amount of content with a constructive algorithm and label it using a Large Language Model (LLM). We use these synthetic labels to condition two PCGML models for content-specific generation, a diffusion model and the five-dollar model. This neural network distillation process ensures that the generation aligns with the original algorithm while introducing controllability through plain text. We define this text-conditioned PCGML as a Text-to-game-Map (T2M) task, offering an alternative to prevalent text-to-image multi-modal tasks. We compare our distilled models with the baseline constructive algorithm. Our analysis of the variety, accuracy, and quality of our generation demonstrates the efficacy of distilling constructive methods into controllable text-conditioned PCGML models.
FASST: Fast LLM-based Simultaneous Speech Translation
Ouyang, Siqi, Xu, Xi, Dandekar, Chinmay, Li, Lei
Simultaneous speech translation (SST) takes streaming speech input and generates text translation on the fly. Existing methods either have high latency due to recomputation of input representations, or fall behind of offline ST in translation quality. In this paper, we propose FASST, a fast large language model based method for streaming speech translation. We propose blockwise-causal speech encoding and consistency mask, so that streaming speech input can be encoded incrementally without recomputation. Furthermore, we develop a two-stage training strategy to optimize FASST for simultaneous inference. We evaluate FASST and multiple strong prior models on MuST-C dataset. Experiment results show that FASST achieves the best quality-latency trade-off. It outperforms the previous best model by an average of 1.5 BLEU under the same latency for English to Spanish translation.
Enhancing Quantum Memory Lifetime with Measurement-Free Local Error Correction and Reinforcement Learning
Park, Mincheol, Maskara, Nishad, Kalinowski, Marcin, Lukin, Mikhail D.
Reliable quantum computation requires systematic identification and correction of errors that occur and accumulate in quantum hardware. To diagnose and correct such errors, standard quantum error-correcting protocols utilize $\textit{global}$ error information across the system obtained by mid-circuit readout of ancillary qubits. We investigate circuit-level error-correcting protocols that are measurement-free and based on $\textit{local}$ error information. Such a local error correction (LEC) circuit consists of faulty multi-qubit gates to perform both syndrome extraction and ancilla-controlled error removal. We develop and implement a reinforcement learning framework that takes a fixed set of faulty gates as inputs and outputs an optimized LEC circuit. To evaluate this approach, we quantitatively characterize an extension of logical qubit lifetime by a noisy LEC circuit. For the 2D classical Ising model and 4D toric code, our optimized LEC circuit performs better at extending a memory lifetime compared to a conventional LEC circuit based on Toom's rule in a sub-threshold gate error regime. We further show that such circuits can be used to reduce the rate of mid-circuit readouts to preserve a 2D toric code memory. Finally, we discuss the application of the LEC protocol on dissipative preparation of quantum states with topological phases.
Recording for Eyes, Not Echoing to Ears: Contextualized Spoken-to-Written Conversion of ASR Transcripts
Liu, Jiaqing, Deng, Chong, Zhang, Qinglin, Chen, Qian, Yu, Hai, Wang, Wen
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts exhibit recognition errors and various spoken language phenomena such as disfluencies, ungrammatical sentences, and incomplete sentences, hence suffering from poor readability. To improve readability, we propose a Contextualized Spoken-to-Written conversion (CoS2W) task to address ASR and grammar errors and also transfer the informal text into the formal style with content preserved, utilizing contexts and auxiliary information. This task naturally matches the in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To facilitate comprehensive comparisons of various LLMs, we construct a document-level Spoken-to-Written conversion of ASR Transcripts Benchmark (SWAB) dataset. Using SWAB, we study the impact of different granularity levels on the CoS2W performance, and propose methods to exploit contexts and auxiliary information to enhance the outputs. Experimental results reveal that LLMs have the potential to excel in the CoS2W task, particularly in grammaticality and formality, our methods achieve effective understanding of contexts and auxiliary information by LLMs. We further investigate the effectiveness of using LLMs as evaluators and find that LLM evaluators show strong correlations with human evaluations on rankings of faithfulness and formality, which validates the reliability of LLM evaluators for the CoS2W task.