Cough-based diagnosis for Respiratory Diseases (RDs) using Artificial Intelligence (AI) has attracted considerable attention, yet many existing studies overlook confounding variables in their predictive models. These variables can distort the relationship between cough recordings (input data) and RD status (output variable), leading to biased associations and unrealistic model performance. To address this gap, we propose the Bias Free Network (RBFNet), an end to end solution that effectively mitigates the impact of confounders in the training data distribution. RBFNet ensures accurate and unbiased RD diagnosis features, emphasizing its relevance by incorporating a COVID19 dataset in this study. This approach aims to enhance the reliability of AI based RD diagnosis models by navigating the challenges posed by confounding variables. A hybrid of a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks is proposed for the feature encoder module of RBFNet. An additional bias predictor is incorporated in the classification scheme to formulate a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) which helps in decorrelating the impact of confounding variables from RD prediction. The merit of RBFNet is demonstrated by comparing classification performance with State of The Art (SoTA) Deep Learning (DL) model (CNN LSTM) after training on different unbalanced COVID-19 data sets, created by using a large scale proprietary cough data set. RBF-Net proved its robustness against extremely biased training scenarios by achieving test set accuracies of 84.1%, 84.6%, and 80.5% for the following confounding variables gender, age, and smoking status, respectively. RBF-Net outperforms the CNN-LSTM model test set accuracies by 5.5%, 7.7%, and 8.2%, respectively
Few-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) with Large Language Models (LLM) relies on an effective and efficient conversation retriever to find similar in-context examples for prompt learning. Previous works use raw dialogue context as search keys and queries, and a retriever is fine-tuned with annotated dialogues to achieve superior performance. However, the approach is less suited for scaling to new domains or new annotation languages, where fine-tuning data is unavailable. To address this problem, we handle the task of conversation retrieval based on text summaries of the conversations. A LLM-based conversation summarizer is adopted for query and key generation, which enables effective maximum inner product search. To avoid the extra inference cost brought by LLM-based conversation summarization, we further distill a light-weight conversation encoder which produces query embeddings without decoding summaries for test conversations. We validate our retrieval approach on MultiWOZ datasets with GPT-Neo-2.7B and LLaMA-7B/30B. The experimental results show a significant improvement over relevant baselines in real few-shot DST settings.
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT and Llama have demonstrated significant achievements in summarization tasks but struggle with factual inaccuracies, a critical issue in clinical NLP applications where errors could lead to serious consequences. To counter the high costs and limited availability of expert-annotated data for factual alignment, this study introduces an innovative pipeline that utilizes GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to generate high-quality feedback aimed at enhancing factual consistency in clinical note summarization. Our research primarily focuses on edit feedback, mirroring the practical scenario in which medical professionals refine AI system outputs without the need for additional annotations. Despite GPT's proven expertise in various clinical NLP tasks, such as the Medical Licensing Examination, there is scant research on its capacity to deliver expert-level edit feedback for improving weaker LMs or LLMs generation quality. This work leverages GPT's advanced capabilities in clinical NLP to offer expert-level edit feedback. Through the use of two distinct alignment algorithms (DPO and SALT) based on GPT edit feedback, our goal is to reduce hallucinations and align closely with medical facts, endeavoring to narrow the divide between AI-generated content and factual accuracy. This highlights the substantial potential of GPT edits in enhancing the alignment of clinical factuality.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention for their ability to understand text and images, generate human-like text, and perform complex reasoning tasks. However, their ability to generalize this advanced reasoning with a combination of natural language text for decision-making in dynamic situations requires further exploration. In this study, we investigate how well LLMs can adapt and apply a combination of arithmetic and common-sense reasoning, particularly in autonomous driving scenarios. We hypothesize that LLMs hybrid reasoning abilities can improve autonomous driving by enabling them to analyze detected object and sensor data, understand driving regulations and physical laws, and offer additional context. This addresses complex scenarios, like decisions in low visibility (due to weather conditions), where traditional methods might fall short. We evaluated Large Language Models (LLMs) based on accuracy by comparing their answers with human-generated ground truth inside CARLA. The results showed that when a combination of images (detected objects) and sensor data is fed into the LLM, it can offer precise information for brake and throttle control in autonomous vehicles across various weather conditions. This formulation and answers can assist in decision-making for auto-pilot systems.
Graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to identify anomalous graphs that significantly deviate from other ones, which has raised growing attention due to the broad existence and complexity of graph-structured data in many real-world scenarios. However, existing GAD methods usually execute with centralized training, which may lead to privacy leakage risk in some sensitive cases, thereby impeding collaboration among organizations seeking to collectively develop robust GAD models. Although federated learning offers a promising solution, the prevalent non-IID problems and high communication costs present significant challenges, particularly pronounced in collaborations with graph data distributed among different participants. To tackle these challenges, we propose an effective federated graph anomaly detection framework (FGAD). We first introduce an anomaly generator to perturb the normal graphs to be anomalous, and train a powerful anomaly detector by distinguishing generated anomalous graphs from normal ones. Then, we leverage a student model to distill knowledge from the trained anomaly detector (teacher model), which aims to maintain the personality of local models and alleviate the adverse impact of non-IID problems. Moreover, we design an effective collaborative learning mechanism that facilitates the personalization preservation of local models and significantly reduces communication costs among clients. Empirical results of the GAD tasks on non-IID graphs compared with state-of-the-art baselines demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of the proposed FGAD method.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as an effective solution for mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs). The retrieval stage in RAG typically involves a pre-trained embedding model, which converts queries and passages into vectors to capture their semantics. However, a standard pre-trained embedding model may exhibit sub-optimal performance when applied to specific domain knowledge, necessitating fine-tuning. This paper addresses scenarios where the embeddings are only available from a black-box model. We introduce Model augmented fine-tuning (Mafin) -- a novel approach for fine-tuning a black-box embedding model by augmenting it with a trainable embedding model. Our results demonstrate that Mafin significantly enhances the performance of the black-box embeddings by only requiring the training of a small augmented model. We validate the effectiveness of our method on both labeled and unlabeled datasets, illustrating its broad applicability and efficiency.
Incorporating natural language rationales in the prompt and In-Context Learning (ICL) has led to a significant improvement of Large Language Models (LLMs) performance. However, rationales currently require human-annotation or the use of auxiliary proxy models to target promising samples or generate high-quality rationales. In this work, we propose Self-AMPLIFY to generate automatically rationales from post hoc explanation methods applied to Small Language Models (SLMs) to improve their own performance. Self-AMPLIFY is a 3-step method that targets samples, generates rationales and builds a final prompt to leverage ICL. Self-AMPLIFY performance is evaluated on two SLMs and two datasets requiring reasoning abilities: these experiments show that Self-AMPLIFY achieves good results against competitors. Self-AMPLIFY is the first method to apply post hoc explanation methods to SLM to generate rationales to improve their own performance in a fully automated manner.
Empathetic response generation is increasingly significant in AI, necessitating nuanced emotional and cognitive understanding coupled with articulate response expression. Current large language models (LLMs) excel in response expression; however, they lack the ability to deeply understand emotional and cognitive nuances, particularly in pinpointing fine-grained emotions and their triggers. Conversely, small-scale empathetic models (SEMs) offer strength in fine-grained emotion detection and detailed emotion cause identification. To harness the complementary strengths of both LLMs and SEMs, we introduce a Hybrid Empathetic Framework (HEF). HEF regards SEMs as flexible plugins to improve LLM's nuanced emotional and cognitive understanding. Regarding emotional understanding, HEF implements a two-stage emotion prediction strategy, encouraging LLMs to prioritize primary emotions emphasized by SEMs, followed by other categories, substantially alleviates the difficulties for LLMs in fine-grained emotion detection. Regarding cognitive understanding, HEF employs an emotion cause perception strategy, prompting LLMs to focus on crucial emotion-eliciting words identified by SEMs, thus boosting LLMs' capabilities in identifying emotion causes. This collaborative approach enables LLMs to discern emotions more precisely and formulate empathetic responses. We validate HEF on the Empathetic-Dialogue dataset, and the findings indicate that our framework enhances the refined understanding of LLMs and their ability to convey empathetic responses.
The Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) has been developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group to compress point clouds. In its lossy mode, the reconstructed point cloud by G-PCC often suffers from noticeable distortions due to the na\"{i}ve geometry quantization (i.e., grid downsampling). This paper proposes a hierarchical prior-based super resolution method for point cloud geometry compression. The content-dependent hierarchical prior is constructed at the encoder side, which enables coarse-to-fine super resolution of the point cloud geometry at the decoder side. A more accurate prior generally yields improved reconstruction performance, at the cost of increased bits required to encode this side information. With a proper balance between prior accuracy and bit consumption, the proposed method demonstrates substantial Bjontegaard-delta bitrate savings on the MPEG Cat1A dataset, surpassing the octree-based and trisoup-based G-PCC v14. We provide our implementations for reproducible research at //github.com/lidq92/mpeg-pcc-tmc13.
The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) has witnessed significant growth, posing a critical challenge in orchestrating AI models within next-generation 6G networks. Finding optimal AI model placement is significantly more challenging than placing traditional software-based VNFs, due to the introduction of numerous uncertain factors by AI models, such as varying computing resource consumption, dynamic storage requirements, and changing model performance. To address the AI model placement problem under uncertainties, this paper presents a novel approach employing a sequence-to-sequence (S2S) neural network which considers uncertainty estimations. The S2S model, characterized by its encoding-decoding architecture, is designed to take the service chain with a number of AI models as input and produce the corresponding placement of each AI model. To address the introduced uncertainties, our methodology incorporates the orthonormal certificate module for uncertainty estimation and utilizes fuzzy logic for uncertainty representation, thereby enhancing the capabilities of the S2S model. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive results across diverse AI model profiles, network environments, and service chain requests.
The first Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) networks are currently being deployed, but the implementation cost is still prohibitive for most researchers. As such, there is a need for realistic QKD network simulators. The \textit{QKDNetSim} module for the network simulator NS-3 focuses on the representation of packets and the management of key material in a QKD network at the application layer. Although QKDNetSim's representation of a QKD network is insightful, some its components lack the depth that would allow the simulator to faithfully represent the behaviour of a real quantum network. In this work, we analyse QKDNetSim's architecture to identify its limitations, and we present an enhanced version of QKDNetSim in which some of its components have been modified to provide a more realistic simulation environment.