This study assessed the effectiveness of machine learning models in predicting poverty levels in the Philippines using five boosting algorithms: Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), CatBoosting (CatBoost), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). CatBoost emerged as the superior model and achieved the highest scores across accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score at 91 percent, while XGBoost and GBM followed closely with 89 percent and 88 percent respectively. Additionally, the research examined the computational efficiency of these models to analyze the balance between training time, testing speed, and model size factors crucial for real-world applications. Despite its longer training duration, CatBoost demonstrated high testing efficiency. These results indicate that machine learning can aid in poverty prediction and in the development of targeted policy interventions. Future studies should focus on incorporating a wider variety of data to enhance the predictive accuracy and policy utility of these models.

In the emergency department (ED), patients undergo triage and multiple laboratory tests before diagnosis. This time-consuming process causes ED crowding which impacts patient mortality, medical errors, staff burnout, etc. This work proposes (time) cost-effective diagnostic assistance that leverages artificial intelligence systems to help ED clinicians make efficient and accurate diagnoses. In collaboration with ED clinicians, we use public patient data to curate MIMIC-ED-Assist, a benchmark for AI systems to suggest laboratory tests that minimize wait time while accurately predicting critical outcomes such as death. With MIMIC-ED-Assist, we develop ED-Copilot which sequentially suggests patient-specific laboratory tests and makes diagnostic predictions. ED-Copilot employs a pre-trained bio-medical language model to encode patient information and uses reinforcement learning to minimize ED wait time and maximize prediction accuracy. On MIMIC-ED-Assist, ED-Copilot improves prediction accuracy over baselines while halving average wait time from four hours to two hours. ED-Copilot can also effectively personalize treatment recommendations based on patient severity, further highlighting its potential as a diagnostic assistant. Since MIMIC-ED-Assist is a retrospective benchmark, ED-Copilot is restricted to recommend only observed tests. We show ED-Copilot achieves competitive performance without this restriction as the maximum allowed time increases. Our code is available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/ED-Copilot.

We consider the problem of zero-shot one-class visual classification, extending traditional one-class classification to scenarios where only the label of the target class is available. This method aims to discriminate between positive and negative query samples without requiring examples from the target class. We propose a two-step solution that first queries large language models for visually confusing objects and then relies on vision-language pre-trained models (e.g., CLIP) to perform classification. By adapting large-scale vision benchmarks, we demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to outperform adapted off-the-shelf alternatives in this setting. Namely, we propose a realistic benchmark where negative query samples are drawn from the same original dataset as positive ones, including a granularity-controlled version of iNaturalist, where negative samples are at a fixed distance in the taxonomy tree from the positive ones. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate the ability to discriminate a single category from other semantically related ones using only its label.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) repeatedly match or outperform radiologists in lab experiments. However, real-world implementations of radiological AI-based systems are found to provide little to no clinical value. This paper explores how to design AI for clinical usefulness in different contexts. We conducted 19 design sessions and design interventions with 13 radiologists from 7 clinical sites in Denmark and Kenya, based on three iterations of a functional AI-based prototype. Ten sociotechnical dependencies were identified as crucial for the design of AI in radiology. We conceptualised four technical dimensions that must be configured to the intended clinical context of use: AI functionality, AI medical focus, AI decision threshold, and AI Explainability. We present four design recommendations on how to address dependencies pertaining to the medical knowledge, clinic type, user expertise level, patient context, and user situation that condition the configuration of these technical dimensions.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are a major asset for companies thanks to their great flexibility in data representation and their numerous applications, e.g., vocabulary sharing, Q/A or recommendation systems. To build a KG it is a common practice to rely on automatic methods for extracting knowledge from various heterogeneous sources. But in a noisy and uncertain world, knowledge may not be reliable and conflicts between data sources may occur. Integrating unreliable data would directly impact the use of the KG, therefore such conflicts must be resolved. This could be done manually by selecting the best data to integrate. This first approach is highly accurate, but costly and time-consuming. That is why recent efforts focus on automatic approaches, which represents a challenging task since it requires handling the uncertainty of extracted knowledge throughout its integration into the KG. We survey state-of-the-art approaches in this direction and present constructions of both open and enterprise KGs and how their quality is maintained. We then describe different knowledge extraction methods, introducing additional uncertainty. We also discuss downstream tasks after knowledge acquisition, including KG completion using embedding models, knowledge alignment, and knowledge fusion in order to address the problem of knowledge uncertainty in KG construction. We conclude with a discussion on the remaining challenges and perspectives when constructing a KG taking into account uncertainty.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is important for deploying machine learning models in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robot-assisted surgery. Existing research has mainly focused on unimodal scenarios on image data. However, real-world applications are inherently multimodal, which makes it essential to leverage information from multiple modalities to enhance the efficacy of OOD detection. To establish a foundation for more realistic Multimodal OOD Detection, we introduce the first-of-its-kind benchmark, MultiOOD, characterized by diverse dataset sizes and varying modality combinations. We first evaluate existing unimodal OOD detection algorithms on MultiOOD, observing that the mere inclusion of additional modalities yields substantial improvements. This underscores the importance of utilizing multiple modalities for OOD detection. Based on the observation of Modality Prediction Discrepancy between in-distribution (ID) and OOD data, and its strong correlation with OOD performance, we propose the Agree-to-Disagree (A2D) algorithm to encourage such discrepancy during training. Moreover, we introduce a novel outlier synthesis method, NP-Mix, which explores broader feature spaces by leveraging the information from nearest neighbor classes and complements A2D to strengthen OOD detection performance. Extensive experiments on MultiOOD demonstrate that training with A2D and NP-Mix improves existing OOD detection algorithms by a large margin. Our source code and MultiOOD benchmark are available at https://github.com/donghao51/MultiOOD.

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning framework in which a set of local communities collaboratively learn a shared global model while retaining all training data locally within each community. Two notions of fairness have recently emerged as important issues for federated learning: group fairness and community fairness. Group fairness requires that a model's decisions do not favor any particular group based on a set of legally protected attributes such as race or gender. Community fairness requires that global models exhibit similar levels of performance (accuracy) across all collaborating communities. Both fairness concepts can coexist within an FL framework, but the existing literature has focused on either one concept or the other. This paper proposes and analyzes a post-processing fair federated learning (FFL) framework called post-FFL. Post-FFL uses a linear program to simultaneously enforce group and community fairness while maximizing the utility of the global model. Because Post-FFL is a post-processing approach, it can be used with existing FL training pipelines whose convergence properties are well understood. This paper uses post-FFL on real-world datasets to mimic how hospital networks, for example, use federated learning to deliver community health care. Theoretical results bound the accuracy lost when post-FFL enforces both notion of fairness. Experimental results illustrate that post-FFL simultaneously improves both group and community fairness in FL. Moreover, post-FFL outperforms the existing in-processing fair federated learning in terms of improving both notions of fairness, communication efficiency and computation cost.

The detection of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) using machine learning techniques represents a significant advancement in medical diagnostics, aiming to enhance early detection, accuracy, and efficiency. This study explores a comparative analysis of various machine learning algorithms, including Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and XGBoost. By utilising a structured workflow encompassing data collection, preprocessing, model selection and hyperparameter tuning, training, evaluation, and choice of the optimal model, this research addresses the critical need for improved diagnostic tools. The findings highlight the efficacy of ensemble methods and advanced algorithms in providing reliable predictions, thereby offering a comprehensive framework for CVD detection that can be readily implemented and adapted in clinical settings.

Fast feedforward networks (FFFs) are a class of neural networks that exploit the observation that different regions of the input space activate distinct subsets of neurons in wide networks. FFFs partition the input space into separate sections using a differentiable binary tree of neurons and during inference descend the binary tree in order to improve computational efficiency. Inspired by Mixture of Experts (MoE) research, we propose the incorporation of load balancing and Master Leaf techniques into the FFF architecture to improve performance and simplify the training process. We reproduce experiments found in literature and present results on FFF models enhanced using these techniques. The proposed architecture and training recipe achieves up to 16.3% and 3% absolute classification accuracy increase in training and test accuracy, respectively, compared to the original FFF architecture. Additionally, we observe a smaller variance in the results compared to those reported in prior research. These findings demonstrate the potential of integrating MoE-inspired techniques into FFFs for developing more accurate and efficient models.

WHO has declared that more than 2.2 billion people worldwide are suffering from visual disorders, such as media haze, glaucoma, and drusen. At least 1 billion of these cases could have been either prevented or successfully treated, yet they remain unaddressed due to poverty, a lack of specialists, inaccurate ocular fundus diagnoses by ophthalmologists, or the presence of a rare disease. To address this, the research has developed the Hybrid Trio-Network Model Algorithm for accurately diagnosing 12 distinct common and rare eye diseases. This algorithm utilized the RFMiD dataset of 3,200 fundus images and the Binary Relevance Method to detect diseases separately, ensuring expandability and avoiding incorrect correlations. Each detector, incorporating finely tuned hyperparameters to optimize performance, consisted of three feature components: A classical transfer learning CNN model, a two-stage CNN model, and a Siamese Network. The diagnosis was made using features extracted through this Trio-Model with Ensembled Machine Learning algorithms. The proposed model achieved an average accuracy of 97% and an AUC score of 0.96. Compared to past benchmark studies, an increase of over 10% in the F1-score was observed for most diseases. Furthermore, using the Siamese Network, the model successfully made predictions in diseases like optic disc pallor, which past studies failed to predict due to low confidence. This diagnostic tool presents a stable, adaptive, cost-effective, efficient, accessible, and fast solution for globalizing early detection of both common and rare diseases.