Rapid advancements in continual segmentation have yet to bridge the gap of scaling to large continually expanding vocabularies under compute-constrained scenarios. We discover that traditional continual training leads to catastrophic forgetting under compute constraints, unable to outperform zero-shot segmentation methods. We introduce a novel strategy for semantic and panoptic segmentation with zero forgetting, capable of adapting to continually growing vocabularies without the need for retraining or large memory costs. Our training-free approach, kNN-CLIP, leverages a database of instance embeddings to enable open-vocabulary segmentation approaches to continually expand their vocabulary on any given domain with a single-pass through data, while only storing embeddings minimizing both compute and memory costs. This method achieves state-of-the-art mIoU performance across large-vocabulary semantic and panoptic segmentation datasets. We hope kNN-CLIP represents a step forward in enabling more efficient and adaptable continual segmentation, paving the way for advances in real-world large-vocabulary continual segmentation methods. Figure 1: We propose kNN-CLIP to continually expand the vocabulary space of segmentation models.

The exponential growth of scientific literature requires effective management and extraction of valuable insights. While existing scientific search engines excel at delivering search results based on relational databases, they often neglect the analysis of collaborations between scientific entities and the evolution of ideas, as well as the in-depth analysis of content within scientific publications. The representation of heterogeneous graphs and the effective measurement, analysis, and mining of such graphs pose significant challenges. To address these challenges, we present AceMap, an academic system designed for knowledge discovery through academic graph. We present advanced database construction techniques to build the comprehensive AceMap database with large-scale academic entities that contain rich visual, textual, and numerical information. AceMap also employs innovative visualization, quantification, and analysis methods to explore associations and logical relationships among academic entities. AceMap introduces large-scale academic network visualization techniques centered on nebular graphs, providing a comprehensive view of academic networks from multiple perspectives. In addition, AceMap proposes a unified metric based on structural entropy to quantitatively measure the knowledge content of different academic entities. Moreover, AceMap provides advanced analysis capabilities, including tracing the evolution of academic ideas through citation relationships and concept co-occurrence, and generating concise summaries informed by this evolutionary process. In addition, AceMap uses machine reading methods to generate potential new ideas at the intersection of different fields. Exploring the integration of large language models and knowledge graphs is a promising direction for future research in idea evolution. Please visit \url{https://www.acemap.info} for further exploration.

In this paper, we explore the application of cognitive intelligence in legal knowledge, focusing on the development of judicial artificial intelligence. Utilizing natural language processing (NLP) as the core technology, we propose a method for the automatic construction of case knowledge graphs for judicial cases. Our approach centers on two fundamental NLP tasks: entity recognition and relationship extraction. We compare two pre-trained models for entity recognition to establish their efficacy. Additionally, we introduce a multi-task semantic relationship extraction model that incorporates translational embedding, leading to a nuanced contextualized case knowledge representation. Specifically, in a case study involving a "Motor Vehicle Traffic Accident Liability Dispute," our approach significantly outperforms the baseline model. The entity recognition F1 score improved by 0.36, while the relationship extraction F1 score increased by 2.37. Building on these results, we detail the automatic construction process of case knowledge graphs for judicial cases, enabling the assembly of knowledge graphs for hundreds of thousands of judgments. This framework provides robust semantic support for applications of judicial AI, including the precise categorization and recommendation of related cases.

In today's digital world, seeking answers to health questions on the Internet is a common practice. However, existing question answering (QA) systems often rely on using pre-selected and annotated evidence documents, thus making them inadequate for addressing novel questions. Our study focuses on the open-domain QA setting, where the key challenge is to first uncover relevant evidence in large knowledge bases. By utilizing the common retrieve-then-read QA pipeline and PubMed as a trustworthy collection of medical research documents, we answer health questions from three diverse datasets. We modify different retrieval settings to observe their influence on the QA pipeline's performance, including the number of retrieved documents, sentence selection process, the publication year of articles, and their number of citations. Our results reveal that cutting down on the amount of retrieved documents and favoring more recent and highly cited documents can improve the final macro F1 score up to 10%. We discuss the results, highlight interesting examples, and outline challenges for future research, like managing evidence disagreement and crafting user-friendly explanations.

Learning an effective representation in multi-label text classification (MLTC) is a significant challenge in NLP. This challenge arises from the inherent complexity of the task, which is shaped by two key factors: the intricate connections between labels and the widespread long-tailed distribution of the data. To overcome this issue, one potential approach involves integrating supervised contrastive learning with classical supervised loss functions. Although contrastive learning has shown remarkable performance in multi-class classification, its impact in the multi-label framework has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study of supervised contrastive learning and its influence on representation in MLTC context. We emphasize the importance of considering long-tailed data distributions to build a robust representation space, which effectively addresses two critical challenges associated with contrastive learning that we identify: the "lack of positives" and the "attraction-repulsion imbalance". Building on this insight, we introduce a novel contrastive loss function for MLTC. It attains Micro-F1 scores that either match or surpass those obtained with other frequently employed loss functions, and demonstrates a significant improvement in Macro-F1 scores across three multi-label datasets.

Contrastive learning has gained widespread adoption for retrieval tasks due to its minimal requirement for manual annotations. However, popular contrastive frameworks typically learn from binary relevance, making them ineffective at incorporating direct fine-grained rankings. In this paper, we curate a large-scale dataset featuring detailed relevance scores for each query-document pair to facilitate future research and evaluation. Subsequently, we propose Generalized Contrastive Learning for Multi-Modal Retrieval and Ranking (GCL), which is designed to learn from fine-grained rankings beyond binary relevance score. Our results show that GCL achieves a 94.5% increase in NDCG@10 for in-domain and 26.3 to 48.8% increases for cold-start evaluations, measured relative to the CLIP baseline within our curated ranked dataset. Our dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/marqo-ai/GCL.

This paper presents our winning submission to Subtask 2 of SemEval 2024 Task 3 on multimodal emotion cause analysis in conversations. We propose a novel Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Multimodal Emotion Cause Extraction (MER-MCE) framework that integrates text, audio, and visual modalities using specialized emotion encoders. Our approach sets itself apart from top-performing teams by leveraging modality-specific features for enhanced emotion understanding and causality inference. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the advantages of our multimodal approach, with our submission achieving a competitive weighted F1 score of 0.3435, ranking third with a margin of only 0.0339 behind the 1st team and 0.0025 behind the 2nd team. Project: https://github.com/MIPS-COLT/MER-MCE.git

Retrieving information from EHR systems is essential for answering specific questions about patient journeys and improving the delivery of clinical care. Despite this fact, most EHR systems still rely on keyword-based searches. With the advent of generative large language models (LLMs), retrieving information can lead to better search and summarization capabilities. Such retrievers can also feed Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines to answer any query. However, the task of retrieving information from EHR real-world clinical data contained within EHR systems in order to solve several downstream use cases is challenging due to the difficulty in creating query-document support pairs. We provide a blueprint for creating such datasets in an affordable manner using large language models. Our method results in a retriever that is 30-50 F-1 points better than propriety counterparts such as Ada and Mistral for oncology data elements. We further compare our model, called Onco-Retriever, against fine-tuned PubMedBERT model as well. We conduct an extensive manual evaluation on real-world EHR data along with latency analysis of the different models and provide a path forward for healthcare organizations to build domain-specific retrievers.

In approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) methods based on approximate proximity graphs, DiskANN achieves good recall-speed balance for large-scale datasets using both of RAM and storage. Despite it claims to save memory usage by loading compressed vectors by product quantization (PQ), its memory usage increases in proportion to the scale of datasets. In this paper, we propose All-in-Storage ANNS with Product Quantization (AiSAQ), which offloads the compressed vectors to storage. Our method achieves $\sim$10 MB memory usage in query search even with billion-scale datasets with minor performance degradation. AiSAQ also reduces the index load time before query search, which enables the index switch between muitiple billion-scale datasets and significantly enhances the flexibility of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). This method is applicable to all graph-based ANNS algorithms and can be combined with higher-spec ANNS methods in the future.

Entity resolution (record linkage, microclustering) systems are notoriously difficult to evaluate. Looking for a needle in a haystack, traditional evaluation methods use sophisticated, application-specific sampling schemes to find matching pairs of records among an immense number of non-matches. We propose an alternative that facilitates the creation of representative, reusable benchmark data sets without necessitating complex sampling schemes. These benchmark data sets can then be used for model training and a variety of evaluation tasks. Specifically, we propose an entity-centric data labeling methodology that integrates with a unified framework for monitoring summary statistics, estimating key performance metrics such as cluster and pairwise precision and recall, and analyzing root causes for errors. We validate the framework in an application to inventor name disambiguation and through simulation studies. Software: https://github.com/OlivierBinette/er-evaluation/