Dual-Curriculum Contrastive Multi-Instance Learning for Cancer Prognosis Analysis with Whole Slide Images

Neural Information Processing Systems

The multi-instance learning (MIL) has advanced cancer prognosis analysis with whole slide images (WSIs). However, current MIL methods for WSI analysis still confront unique challenges. Previous methods typically generate instance representations via a pre-trained model or a model trained by the instances with bag-level annotations, which, however, may not generalize well to the downstream task due to the introduction of excessive label noises and the lack of fine-grained information across multi-magnification WSIs. Additionally, existing methods generally aggregate instance representations as bag ones for prognosis prediction and have no consideration of intra-bag redundancy and inter-bag discrimination. To address these issues, we propose a dual-curriculum contrastive MIL method for cancer prognosis analysis with WSIs. The proposed method consists of two curriculums, i.e., saliency-guided weakly-supervised instance encoding with cross-scale tiles and contrastive-enhanced soft-bag prognosis inference. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in this field.


Understanding the Differences in Foundation Models: Attention, State Space Models, and Recurrent Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Softmax attention is the principle backbone of foundation models for various artificial intelligence applications, yet its quadratic complexity in sequence length can limit its inference throughput in long-context settings. To address this challenge, alternative architectures such as linear attention, State Space Models (SSMs), and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been considered as more efficient alternatives. While connections between these approaches exist, such models are commonly developed in isolation and there is a lack of theoretical understanding of the shared principles underpinning these architectures and their subtle differences, greatly influencing performance and scalability. In this paper, we introduce the Dynamical Systems Framework (DSF), which allows a principled investigation of all these architectures in a common representation.


Importance Weighted Actor-Critic for Optimal Conservative Offline Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose A-Crab (Actor-Critic Regularized by Average Bellman error), a new practical algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) in complex environments with insufficient data coverage. Our algorithm combines the marginalized importance sampling framework with the actor-critic paradigm, where the critic returns evaluations of the actor (policy) that are pessimistic relative to the offline data and have a small average (importance-weighted) Bellman error. Compared to existing methods, our algorithm simultaneously offers a number of advantages: (1) It achieves the optimal statistical rate of 1/ N--where N is the size of offline dataset--in converging to the best policy covered in the offline dataset, even when combined with general function approximators.


Importance Weighted Actor-Critic for Optimal Conservative Offline Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose A-Crab (Actor-Critic Regularized by Average Bellman error), a new practical algorithm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) in complex environments with insufficient data coverage. Our algorithm combines the marginalized importance sampling framework with the actor-critic paradigm, where the critic returns evaluations of the actor (policy) that are pessimistic relative to the offline data and have a small average (importance-weighted) Bellman error. Compared to existing methods, our algorithm simultaneously offers a number of advantages: (1) It achieves the optimal statistical rate of 1/ N--where N is the size of offline dataset--in converging to the best policy covered in the offline dataset, even when combined with general function approximators.


Semantic Density: Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models through Confidence Measurement in Semantic Space

Neural Information Processing Systems

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to various domains, concerns regarding the trustworthiness of LLMs in safety-critical scenarios have been raised, due to their unpredictable tendency to hallucinate and generate misinformation. Existing LLMs do not have an inherent functionality to provide the users with an uncertainty/confidence metric for each response it generates, making it difficult to evaluate trustworthiness. Although several studies aim to develop uncertainty quantification methods for LLMs, they have fundamental limitations, such as being restricted to classification tasks, requiring additional training and data, considering only lexical instead of semantic information, and being prompt-wise but not response-wise. A new framework is proposed in this paper to address these issues.




f26b29298ae8acd94bd7e839688e329b-Supplemental-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

For what purpose was the dataset created? Was there a specific task in mind? This work is partially funded by Cisco and Amazon. Are there multiple types of instances (e.g. Each scenario essentially contains a user's LLM's generated program conforms to the user's intent.


IaC-Eval: A Code Generation Benchmark for Cloud Infrastructure-as-Code Programs, Xinyu Wang University of Michigan

Neural Information Processing Systems

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), an important component of cloud computing, allows the definition of cloud infrastructure in high-level programs. However, developing IaC programs is challenging, complicated by factors that include the burgeoning complexity of the cloud ecosystem (e.g., diversity of cloud services and workloads), and the relative scarcity of IaC-specific code examples and public repositories. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in general code generation and could potentially aid in IaC development, no benchmarks currently exist for evaluating their ability to generate IaC code.