The primary aim of this research was to address the limitations observed in the medical knowledge of prevalent large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, by creating a specialized language model with enhanced accuracy in medical advice. We achieved this by adapting and refining the large language model meta-AI (LLaMA) using a large dataset of 100,000 patient-doctor dialogues sourced from a widely used online medical consultation platform. These conversations were cleaned and anonymized to respect privacy concerns. In addition to the model refinement, we incorporated a self-directed information retrieval mechanism, allowing the model to access and utilize real-time information from online sources like Wikipedia and data from curated offline medical databases. The fine-tuning of the model with real-world patient-doctor interactions significantly improved the model's ability to understand patient needs and provide informed advice. By equipping the model with self-directed information retrieval from reliable online and offline sources, we observed substantial improvements in the accuracy of its responses. Our proposed ChatDoctor, represents a significant advancement in medical LLMs, demonstrating a significant improvement in understanding patient inquiries and providing accurate advice. Given the high stakes and low error tolerance in the medical field, such enhancements in providing accurate and reliable information are not only beneficial but essential.
This study presents a multi-modal mechanism for recognizing human intentions while diving underwater, aiming to achieve natural human-robot interactions through an underwater superlimb for diving assistance. The underwater environment severely limits the divers' capabilities in intention expression, which becomes more challenging when they intend to operate tools while keeping control of body postures in 3D with the various diving suits and gears. The current literature is limited in underwater intention recognition, impeding the development of intelligent wearable systems for human-robot interactions underwater. Here, we present a novel solution to simultaneously detect head motion and throat vibrations under the water in a compact, wearable design. Experiment results show that using machine learning algorithms, we achieved high performance in integrating these two modalities to translate human intentions to robot control commands for an underwater superlimb system. This study's results paved the way for future development in underwater intention recognition and underwater human-robot interactions with supernumerary support.
Hateful meme detection is a challenging multimodal task that requires comprehension of both vision and language, as well as cross-modal interactions. Recent studies have tried to fine-tune pre-trained vision-language models (PVLMs) for this task. However, with increasing model sizes, it becomes important to leverage powerful PVLMs more efficiently, rather than simply fine-tuning them. Recently, researchers have attempted to convert meme images into textual captions and prompt language models for predictions. This approach has shown good performance but suffers from non-informative image captions. Considering the two factors mentioned above, we propose a probing-based captioning approach to leverage PVLMs in a zero-shot visual question answering (VQA) manner. Specifically, we prompt a frozen PVLM by asking hateful content-related questions and use the answers as image captions (which we call Pro-Cap), so that the captions contain information critical for hateful content detection. The good performance of models with Pro-Cap on three benchmarks validates the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method.
As the study of graph neural networks becomes more intensive and comprehensive, their robustness and security have received great research interest. The existing global attack methods treat all nodes in the graph as their attack targets. Although existing methods have achieved excellent results, there is still considerable space for improvement. The key problem is that the current approaches rigidly follow the definition of global attacks. They ignore an important issue, i.e., different nodes have different robustness and are not equally resilient to attacks. From a global attacker's view, we should arrange the attack budget wisely, rather than wasting them on highly robust nodes. To this end, we propose a totally new method named partial graph attack (PGA), which selects the vulnerable nodes as attack targets. First, to select the vulnerable items, we propose a hierarchical target selection policy, which allows attackers to only focus on easy-to-attack nodes. Then, we propose a cost-effective anchor-picking policy to pick the most promising anchors for adding or removing edges, and a more aggressive iterative greedy-based attack method to perform more efficient attacks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PGA can achieve significant improvements in both attack effect and attack efficiency compared to other existing graph global attack methods.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
Inspired by the human cognitive system, attention is a mechanism that imitates the human cognitive awareness about specific information, amplifying critical details to focus more on the essential aspects of data. Deep learning has employed attention to boost performance for many applications. Interestingly, the same attention design can suit processing different data modalities and can easily be incorporated into large networks. Furthermore, multiple complementary attention mechanisms can be incorporated in one network. Hence, attention techniques have become extremely attractive. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey specific to attention techniques to guide researchers in employing attention in their deep models. Note that, besides being demanding in terms of training data and computational resources, transformers only cover a single category in self-attention out of the many categories available. We fill this gap and provide an in-depth survey of 50 attention techniques categorizing them by their most prominent features. We initiate our discussion by introducing the fundamental concepts behind the success of attention mechanism. Next, we furnish some essentials such as the strengths and limitations of each attention category, describe their fundamental building blocks, basic formulations with primary usage, and applications specifically for computer vision. We also discuss the challenges and open questions related to attention mechanism in general. Finally, we recommend possible future research directions for deep attention.
Influenced by the stunning success of deep learning in computer vision and language understanding, research in recommendation has shifted to inventing new recommender models based on neural networks. In recent years, we have witnessed significant progress in developing neural recommender models, which generalize and surpass traditional recommender models owing to the strong representation power of neural networks. In this survey paper, we conduct a systematic review on neural recommender models, aiming to summarize the field to facilitate future progress. Distinct from existing surveys that categorize existing methods based on the taxonomy of deep learning techniques, we instead summarize the field from the perspective of recommendation modeling, which could be more instructive to researchers and practitioners working on recommender systems. Specifically, we divide the work into three types based on the data they used for recommendation modeling: 1) collaborative filtering models, which leverage the key source of user-item interaction data; 2) content enriched models, which additionally utilize the side information associated with users and items, like user profile and item knowledge graph; and 3) context enriched models, which account for the contextual information associated with an interaction, such as time, location, and the past interactions. After reviewing representative works for each type, we finally discuss some promising directions in this field, including benchmarking recommender systems, graph reasoning based recommendation models, and explainable and fair recommendations for social good.
Human doctors with well-structured medical knowledge can diagnose a disease merely via a few conversations with patients about symptoms. In contrast, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems often require a large number of dialogue instances to learn as they fail to capture the correlations between different diseases and neglect the diagnostic experience shared among them. To address this issue, we propose a more natural and practical paradigm, i.e., low-resource medical dialogue generation, which can transfer the diagnostic experience from source diseases to target ones with a handful of data for adaptation. It is capitalized on a commonsense knowledge graph to characterize the prior disease-symptom relations. Besides, we develop a Graph-Evolving Meta-Learning (GEML) framework that learns to evolve the commonsense graph for reasoning disease-symptom correlations in a new disease, which effectively alleviates the needs of a large number of dialogues. More importantly, by dynamically evolving disease-symptom graphs, GEML also well addresses the real-world challenges that the disease-symptom correlations of each disease may vary or evolve along with more diagnostic cases. Extensive experiment results on the CMDD dataset and our newly-collected Chunyu dataset testify the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, our GEML can generate an enriched dialogue-sensitive knowledge graph in an online manner, which could benefit other tasks grounded on knowledge graph.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
Many natural language processing tasks solely rely on sparse dependencies between a few tokens in a sentence. Soft attention mechanisms show promising performance in modeling local/global dependencies by soft probabilities between every two tokens, but they are not effective and efficient when applied to long sentences. By contrast, hard attention mechanisms directly select a subset of tokens but are difficult and inefficient to train due to their combinatorial nature. In this paper, we integrate both soft and hard attention into one context fusion model, "reinforced self-attention (ReSA)", for the mutual benefit of each other. In ReSA, a hard attention trims a sequence for a soft self-attention to process, while the soft attention feeds reward signals back to facilitate the training of the hard one. For this purpose, we develop a novel hard attention called "reinforced sequence sampling (RSS)", selecting tokens in parallel and trained via policy gradient. Using two RSS modules, ReSA efficiently extracts the sparse dependencies between each pair of selected tokens. We finally propose an RNN/CNN-free sentence-encoding model, "reinforced self-attention network (ReSAN)", solely based on ReSA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) and Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK) datasets.