Accurate predictions of the populations and spatial distributions of wild animal species is critical from a species management and conservation perspective. Culling is a measure taken for various reasons, including when overpopulation of a species is observed or suspected. Thus accurate estimates of population numbers are essential for specifying, monitoring, and evaluating the impact of such programmes. Population data for wild animals is generally collated from various sources and at differing spatial resolutions. Citizen science projects typically provide point referenced data, whereas site surveys, hunter reports, and official government data may be aggregated and released at a small area or regional level. Jointly modelling these data resources involves overcoming challenges of spatial misalignment. In this article, we develop an N mixture modelling methodology for joint modelling of species populations in the presence of spatially misaligned data, motivated by the three main species of wild deer in the Republic of Ireland; fallow, red and sika. Previous studies of deer populations investigated the distribution and abundance on a species by species basis, failing to account for possible correlation between individual species and the impact of ecological covariates on their distributions.
A large dataset of annotated traffic accidents is necessary to improve the accuracy of traffic accident recognition using deep learning models. Conventional traffic accident datasets provide annotations on traffic accidents and other teacher labels, improving traffic accident recognition performance. However, the labels annotated in conventional datasets need to be more comprehensive to describe traffic accidents in detail. Therefore, we propose V-TIDB, a large-scale traffic accident recognition dataset annotated with various environmental information as multi-labels. Our proposed dataset aims to improve the performance of traffic accident recognition by annotating ten types of environmental information as teacher labels in addition to the presence or absence of traffic accidents. V-TIDB is constructed by collecting many videos from the Internet and annotating them with appropriate environmental information. In our experiments, we compare the performance of traffic accident recognition when only labels related to the presence or absence of traffic accidents are trained and when environmental information is added as a multi-label. In the second experiment, we compare the performance of the training with only contact level, which represents the severity of the traffic accident, and the performance with environmental information added as a multi-label. The results showed that 6 out of 10 environmental information labels improved the performance of recognizing the presence or absence of traffic accidents. In the experiment on the degree of recognition of traffic accidents, the performance of recognition of car wrecks and contacts was improved for all environmental information. These experiments show that V-TIDB can be used to learn traffic accident recognition models that take environmental information into account in detail and can be used for appropriate traffic accident analysis.
The generative modeling landscape has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, particularly in generating natural images and art. Recent techniques have shown impressive potential in creating complex visual compositions while delivering impressive realism and quality. However, state-of-the-art methods have been focusing on the narrow domain of natural images, while other distributions remain unexplored. In this paper, we introduce the problem of text-to-figure generation, that is creating scientific figures of papers from text descriptions. We present FigGen, a diffusion-based approach for text-to-figure as well as the main challenges of the proposed task. Code and models are available at //github.com/joanrod/figure-diffusion
This paper introduces and characterizes a new family of continuous probability distributions applicable to norm distributions in three-dimensional random spaces, specifically for the Euclidean norm of three random Gaussian variables with non-zero means. The distribution is specified over the semi-infinite range $[0,\infty)$ and is notable for its computational tractability. Building on this foundation, we also introduce a separate family of continuous probability distributions suitable for power distributions in three-dimensional random spaces. Despite being previously unknown, these distributions are attractive for numerous applications, some of which are discussed in this work.
The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has paved the way for their adoption in the high-stakes domain of healthcare. Specifically, the application of LLMs in patient-trial matching, which involves assessing patient eligibility against clinical trial's nuanced inclusion and exclusion criteria, has shown promise. Recent research has shown that GPT-3.5, a widely recognized LLM developed by OpenAI, can outperform existing methods with minimal 'variable engineering' by simply comparing clinical trial information against patient summaries. However, there are significant challenges associated with using closed-source proprietary LLMs like GPT-3.5 in practical healthcare applications, such as cost, privacy and reproducibility concerns. To address these issues, this study presents the first systematic examination of the efficacy of both proprietary (GPT-3.5, and GPT-4) and open-source LLMs (LLAMA 7B,13B, and 70B) for the task of patient-trial matching. Employing a multifaceted evaluation framework, we conducted extensive automated and human-centric assessments coupled with a detailed error analysis for each model. To enhance the adaptability of open-source LLMs, we have created a specialized synthetic dataset utilizing GPT-4, enabling effective fine-tuning under constrained data conditions. Our findings reveal that open-source LLMs, when fine-tuned on this limited and synthetic dataset, demonstrate performance parity with their proprietary counterparts. This presents a massive opportunity for their deployment in real-world healthcare applications. To foster further research and applications in this field, we release both the annotated evaluation dataset along with the fine-tuned LLM -- Trial-LLAMA -- for public use.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) based image analysis has an immense potential to support diagnostic histopathology, including cancer diagnostics. However, developing supervised AI methods requires large-scale annotated datasets. A potentially powerful solution is to augment training data with synthetic data. Latent diffusion models, which can generate high-quality, diverse synthetic images, are promising. However, the most common implementations rely on detailed textual descriptions, which are not generally available in this domain. This work proposes a method that constructs structured textual prompts from automatically extracted image features. We experiment with the PCam dataset, composed of tissue patches only loosely annotated as healthy or cancerous. We show that including image-derived features in the prompt, as opposed to only healthy and cancerous labels, improves the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) from 178.8 to 90.2. We also show that pathologists find it challenging to detect synthetic images, with a median sensitivity/specificity of 0.55/0.55. Finally, we show that synthetic data effectively trains AI models.
Stochastic programs where the uncertainty distribution must be inferred from noisy data samples are considered. The stochastic programs are approximated with distributionally-robust optimizations that minimize the worst-case expected cost over ambiguity sets, i.e., sets of distributions that are sufficiently compatible with the observed data. In this paper, the ambiguity sets capture the set of probability distributions whose convolution with the noise distribution remains within a ball centered at the empirical noisy distribution of data samples parameterized by the total variation distance. Using the prescribed ambiguity set, the solutions of the distributionally-robust optimizations converge to the solutions of the original stochastic programs when the numbers of the data samples grow to infinity. Therefore, the proposed distributionally-robust optimization problems are asymptotically consistent. This is proved under the assumption that the distribution of the noise is uniformly diagonally dominant. More importantly, the distributionally-robust optimization problems can be cast as tractable convex optimization problems and are therefore amenable to large-scale stochastic problems.
Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed both the academic and industrial landscapes due to their remarkable capacity to understand, analyze, and generate texts based on their vast knowledge and reasoning ability. Nevertheless, one major drawback of LLMs is their substantial computational cost for pre-training due to their unprecedented amounts of parameters. The disadvantage is exacerbated when new knowledge frequently needs to be introduced into the pre-trained model. Therefore, it is imperative to develop effective and efficient techniques to update pre-trained LLMs. Traditional methods encode new knowledge in pre-trained LLMs through direct fine-tuning. However, naively re-training LLMs can be computationally intensive and risks degenerating valuable pre-trained knowledge irrelevant to the update in the model. Recently, Knowledge-based Model Editing (KME) has attracted increasing attention, which aims to precisely modify the LLMs to incorporate specific knowledge, without negatively influencing other irrelevant knowledge. In this survey, we aim to provide a comprehensive and in-depth overview of recent advances in the field of KME. We first introduce a general formulation of KME to encompass different KME strategies. Afterward, we provide an innovative taxonomy of KME techniques based on how the new knowledge is introduced into pre-trained LLMs, and investigate existing KME strategies while analyzing key insights, advantages, and limitations of methods from each category. Moreover, representative metrics, datasets, and applications of KME are introduced accordingly. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis regarding the practicality and remaining challenges of KME and suggest promising research directions for further advancement in this field.
Knowledge graphs capture interlinked information between entities and they represent an attractive source of structured information that can be harnessed for recommender systems. However, existing recommender engines use knowledge graphs by manually designing features, do not allow for end-to-end training, or provide poor scalability. Here we propose Knowledge Graph Convolutional Networks (KGCN), an end-to-end trainable framework that harnesses item relationships captured by the knowledge graph to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, KGCN computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relations for a given user and then transforming the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph. Then, KGCN applies a graph convolutional neural network that computes an embedding of an item node by propagating and aggregating knowledge graph neighborhood information. Moreover, to provide better inductive bias KGCN uses label smoothness (LS), which provides regularization over edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to label propagation scheme on a graph. Finally, We unify KGCN and LS regularization, and present a scalable minibatch implementation for KGCN-LS model. Experiments show that KGCN-LS outperforms strong baselines in four datasets. KGCN-LS also achieves great performance in sparse scenarios and is highly scalable with respect to the knowledge graph size.
Humans and animals have the ability to continually acquire, fine-tune, and transfer knowledge and skills throughout their lifespan. This ability, referred to as lifelong learning, is mediated by a rich set of neurocognitive mechanisms that together contribute to the development and specialization of our sensorimotor skills as well as to long-term memory consolidation and retrieval. Consequently, lifelong learning capabilities are crucial for autonomous agents interacting in the real world and processing continuous streams of information. However, lifelong learning remains a long-standing challenge for machine learning and neural network models since the continual acquisition of incrementally available information from non-stationary data distributions generally leads to catastrophic forgetting or interference. This limitation represents a major drawback for state-of-the-art deep neural network models that typically learn representations from stationary batches of training data, thus without accounting for situations in which information becomes incrementally available over time. In this review, we critically summarize the main challenges linked to lifelong learning for artificial learning systems and compare existing neural network approaches that alleviate, to different extents, catastrophic forgetting. We discuss well-established and emerging research motivated by lifelong learning factors in biological systems such as structural plasticity, memory replay, curriculum and transfer learning, intrinsic motivation, and multisensory integration.
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.