Background: Multiple Sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune disease affecting millions worldwide, is characterized by its variable course, in which some patients will experience a more benign disease course and others a more active one, with the latter leading to permanent neural damage and disability. Methods: This study uses a Markov Chain model to demonstrate the probability of movement across different states on the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) and attempted to define worsening, improvement, cycling, and stability of these different pathways. Most importantly we were interested in assessing the lack of impermanence of confirmed disability worsening and if it could be estimated from the Markov model. Results: The study identified only 8.1% were considered worsening, 5.6% consistent improving and 86% cyclers and less than 1% consistently stable. More importantly we also found that many (approximately 30%) of participants with confirmed disability worsening (CDW) regressed to stages that were not considered worsening, on subsequent visits after CDW. Conclusions: These finding are similar to what has been reported previously as predictors of worsening, and also for a lack of durability of CDW, but our results suggest that clinical trial endpoints may need to be modified to more accurately capture differences between the treatment and control groups. Further, this suggests that the rate of worsening in trials that use time to CDW are overestimating the extent of CDW. The trials remain valid since the regressing applies to both treatment and control groups, but that the results may be underestimating the treatment benefit due to misclassification.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown excellent generalization capabilities that have led to the development of numerous models. These models propose various new architectures, tweaking existing architectures with refined training strategies, increasing context length, using high-quality training data, and increasing training time to outperform baselines. Analyzing new developments is crucial for identifying changes that enhance training stability and improve generalization in LLMs. This survey paper comprehensively analyses the LLMs architectures and their categorization, training strategies, training datasets, and performance evaluations and discusses future research directions. Moreover, the paper also discusses the basic building blocks and concepts behind LLMs, followed by a complete overview of LLMs, including their important features and functions. Finally, the paper summarizes significant findings from LLM research and consolidates essential architectural and training strategies for developing advanced LLMs. Given the continuous advancements in LLMs, we intend to regularly update this paper by incorporating new sections and featuring the latest LLM models.
Recently, Mutual Information (MI) has attracted attention in bounding the generalization error of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, it is intractable to accurately estimate the MI in DNNs, thus most previous works have to relax the MI bound, which in turn weakens the information theoretic explanation for generalization. To address the limitation, this paper introduces a probabilistic representation of DNNs for accurately estimating the MI. Leveraging the proposed MI estimator, we validate the information theoretic explanation for generalization, and derive a tighter generalization bound than the state-of-the-art relaxations.
We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs), which otherwise are considered as black boxes. Existing methods invariably focus on explaining the importance of graph nodes or edges but ignore the substructures of graphs, which are more intuitive and human-intelligible. In this work, we propose a novel method, known as SubgraphX, to explain GNNs by identifying important subgraphs. Given a trained GNN model and an input graph, our SubgraphX explains its predictions by efficiently exploring different subgraphs with Monte Carlo tree search. To make the tree search more effective, we propose to use Shapley values as a measure of subgraph importance, which can also capture the interactions among different subgraphs. To expedite computations, we propose efficient approximation schemes to compute Shapley values for graph data. Our work represents the first attempt to explain GNNs via identifying subgraphs explicitly and directly. Experimental results show that our SubgraphX achieves significantly improved explanations, while keeping computations at a reasonable level.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
Clinical Named Entity Recognition (CNER) aims to identify and classify clinical terms such as diseases, symptoms, treatments, exams, and body parts in electronic health records, which is a fundamental and crucial task for clinical and translational research. In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved significant success in named entity recognition and many other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Most of these algorithms are trained end to end, and can automatically learn features from large scale labeled datasets. However, these data-driven methods typically lack the capability of processing rare or unseen entities. Previous statistical methods and feature engineering practice have demonstrated that human knowledge can provide valuable information for handling rare and unseen cases. In this paper, we address the problem by incorporating dictionaries into deep neural networks for the Chinese CNER task. Two different architectures that extend the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) neural network and five different feature representation schemes are proposed to handle the task. Computational results on the CCKS-2017 Task 2 benchmark dataset show that the proposed method achieves the highly competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art deep learning methods.
Knowledge graphs (KGs), which could provide essential relational information between entities, have been widely utilized in various knowledge-driven applications. Since the overall human knowledge is innumerable that still grows explosively and changes frequently, knowledge construction and update inevitably involve automatic mechanisms with less human supervision, which usually bring in plenty of noises and conflicts to KGs. However, most conventional knowledge representation learning methods assume that all triple facts in existing KGs share the same significance without any noises. To address this problem, we propose a novel confidence-aware knowledge representation learning framework (CKRL), which detects possible noises in KGs while learning knowledge representations with confidence simultaneously. Specifically, we introduce the triple confidence to conventional translation-based methods for knowledge representation learning. To make triple confidence more flexible and universal, we only utilize the internal structural information in KGs, and propose three kinds of triple confidences considering both local and global structural information. In experiments, We evaluate our models on knowledge graph noise detection, knowledge graph completion and triple classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our confidence-aware models achieve significant and consistent improvements on all tasks, which confirms the capability of CKRL modeling confidence with structural information in both KG noise detection and knowledge representation learning.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.