Measuring the impact of an environmental point source exposure on the risk of disease, like cancer or childhood asthma, is well-developed. Modeling how an environmental health hazard that is extensive in space, like a wastewater canal, is not. We propose a novel Bayesian generative semiparametric model for characterizing the cumulative spatial exposure to an environmental health hazard that is not well-represented by a single point in space. The model couples a dose-response model with a log-Gaussian Cox process integrated against a distance kernel with an unknown length-scale. We show that this model is a well-defined Bayesian inverse model, namely that the posterior exists under a Gaussian process prior for the log-intensity of exposure, and that a simple integral approximation adequately controls the computational error. We quantify the finite-sample properties and the computational tractability of the discretization scheme in a simulation study. Finally, we apply the model to survey data on household risk of childhood diarrheal illness from exposure to a system of wastewater canals in Mezquital Valley, Mexico.
Drug response prediction (DRP) is a crucial phase in drug discovery, and the most important metric for its evaluation is the IC50 score. DRP results are heavily dependent on the quality of the generated molecules. Existing molecule generation methods typically employ classifier-based guidance, enabling sampling within the IC50 classification range. However, these methods fail to ensure the sampling space range's effectiveness, generating numerous ineffective molecules. Through experimental and theoretical study, we hypothesize that conditional generation based on the target IC50 score can obtain a more effective sampling space. As a result, we introduce regressor-free guidance molecule generation to ensure sampling within a more effective space and support DRP. Regressor-free guidance combines a diffusion model's score estimation with a regression controller model's gradient based on number labels. To effectively map regression labels between drugs and cell lines, we design a common-sense numerical knowledge graph that constrains the order of text representations. Experimental results on the real-world dataset for the DRP task demonstrate our method's effectiveness in drug discovery. The code is available at://anonymous.4open.science/r/RMCD-DBD1.
Eating disorders (ED), a severe mental health condition with high rates of mortality and morbidity, affect millions of people globally, especially adolescents. The proliferation of online communities that promote and normalize ED has been linked to this public health crisis. However, identifying harmful communities is challenging due to the use of coded language and other obfuscations. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework to surface implicit attitudes of online communities by adapting large language models (LLMs) to the language of the community. We describe an alignment method and evaluate results along multiple dimensions of semantics and affect. We then use the community-aligned LLM to respond to psychometric questionnaires designed to identify ED in individuals. We demonstrate that LLMs can effectively adopt community-specific perspectives and reveal significant variations in eating disorder risks in different online communities. These findings highlight the utility of LLMs to reveal implicit attitudes and collective mindsets of communities, offering new tools for mitigating harmful content on social media.
The rapid development of collaborative robotics has provided a new possibility of helping the elderly who has difficulties in daily life, allowing robots to operate according to specific intentions. However, efficient human-robot cooperation requires natural, accurate and reliable intention recognition in shared environments. The current paramount challenge for this is reducing the uncertainty of multimodal fused intention to be recognized and reasoning adaptively a more reliable result despite current interactive condition. In this work we propose a novel learning-based multimodal fusion framework Batch Multimodal Confidence Learning for Opinion Pool (BMCLOP). Our approach combines Bayesian multimodal fusion method and batch confidence learning algorithm to improve accuracy, uncertainty reduction and success rate given the interactive condition. In particular, the generic and practical multimodal intention recognition framework can be easily extended further. Our desired assistive scenarios consider three modalities gestures, speech and gaze, all of which produce categorical distributions over all the finite intentions. The proposed method is validated with a six-DoF robot through extensive experiments and exhibits high performance compared to baselines.
Discovering the semantics of multimodal utterances is essential for understanding human language and enhancing human-machine interactions. Existing methods manifest limitations in leveraging nonverbal information for discerning complex semantics in unsupervised scenarios. This paper introduces a novel unsupervised multimodal clustering method (UMC), making a pioneering contribution to this field. UMC introduces a unique approach to constructing augmentation views for multimodal data, which are then used to perform pre-training to establish well-initialized representations for subsequent clustering. An innovative strategy is proposed to dynamically select high-quality samples as guidance for representation learning, gauged by the density of each sample's nearest neighbors. Besides, it is equipped to automatically determine the optimal value for the top-$K$ parameter in each cluster to refine sample selection. Finally, both high- and low-quality samples are used to learn representations conducive to effective clustering. We build baselines on benchmark multimodal intent and dialogue act datasets. UMC shows remarkable improvements of 2-6\% scores in clustering metrics over state-of-the-art methods, marking the first successful endeavor in this domain. The complete code and data are available at //github.com/thuiar/UMC.
Deep nonparametric regression, characterized by the utilization of deep neural networks to learn target functions, has emerged as a focal point of research attention in recent years. Despite considerable progress in understanding convergence rates, the absence of asymptotic properties hinders rigorous statistical inference. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework that transforms the deep estimation paradigm into a platform conducive to conditional mean estimation, leveraging the conditional diffusion model. Theoretically, we develop an end-to-end convergence rate for the conditional diffusion model and establish the asymptotic normality of the generated samples. Consequently, we are equipped to construct confidence regions, facilitating robust statistical inference. Furthermore, through numerical experiments, we empirically validate the efficacy of our proposed methodology.
Analyses of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) are common in applied causal inference research. However, when outcomes are latent variables assessed via psychometric instruments such as educational tests, standard methods ignore the potential HTE that may exist among the individual items of the outcome measure. Failing to account for "item-level" HTE (IL-HTE) can lead to both estimated standard errors that are too small and identification challenges in the estimation of treatment-by-covariate interaction effects. We demonstrate how Item Response Theory (IRT) models that estimate a treatment effect for each assessment item can both address these challenges and provide new insights into HTE generally. This study articulates the theoretical rationale for the IL-HTE model and demonstrates its practical value using data from 20 randomized controlled trials containing 2.3 million item responses in economics, education, and health research. Our results show that the IL-HTE model reveals item-level variation masked by average treatment effects, provides more accurate statistical inference, allows for estimates of the generalizability of causal effects, resolves identification problems in the estimation of interaction effects, and provides estimates of standardized treatment effect sizes corrected for attenuation due to measurement error.
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.
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.
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.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.