Improving Scientific Hypothesis Generation with Knowledge Grounded Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various scientific domains, from natural language processing to complex problem-solving tasks. Their ability to understand and generate human-like text has opened up new possibilities for advancing scientific research, enabling tasks such as data analysis, literature review, and even experimental design. One of the most promising applications of LLMs in this context is hypothesis generation, where they can identify novel research directions by analyzing existing knowledge. However, despite their potential, LLMs are prone to generating ``hallucinations'', outputs that are plausible-sounding but factually incorrect. Such a problem presents significant challenges in scientific fields that demand rigorous accuracy and verifiability, potentially leading to erroneous or misleading conclusions. To overcome these challenges, we propose KG-CoI (Knowledge Grounded Chain of Ideas), a novel system that enhances LLM hypothesis generation by integrating external, structured knowledge from knowledge graphs (KGs). KG-CoI guides LLMs through a structured reasoning process, organizing their output as a chain of ideas (CoI), and includes a KG-supported module for the detection of hallucinations. With experiments on our newly constructed hypothesis generation dataset, we demonstrate that KG-CoI not only improves the accuracy of LLM-generated hypotheses but also reduces the hallucination in their reasoning chains, highlighting its effectiveness in advancing real-world scientific research.

IdeaBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Research Idea Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed how people interact with artificial intelligence (AI) systems, achieving state-of-the-art results in various tasks, including scientific discovery and hypothesis generation. However, the lack of a comprehensive and systematic evaluation framework for generating research ideas using LLMs poses a significant obstacle to understanding and assessing their generative capabilities in scientific discovery. To address this gap, we propose IdeaBench, a benchmark system that includes a comprehensive dataset and an evaluation framework for standardizing the assessment of research idea generation using LLMs. Our dataset comprises titles and abstracts from a diverse range of influential papers, along with their referenced works. To emulate the human process of generating research ideas, we profile LLMs as domain-specific researchers and ground them in the same context considered by human researchers. This maximizes the utilization of the LLMs' parametric knowledge to dynamically generate new research ideas. We also introduce an evaluation framework for assessing the quality of generated research ideas. Our evaluation framework is a two-stage process: first, using GPT-4o to rank ideas based on user-specified quality indicators such as novelty and feasibility, enabling scalable personalization; and second, calculating relative ranking based "Insight Score" to quantify the chosen quality indicator. The proposed benchmark system will be a valuable asset for the community to measure and compare different LLMs, ultimately advancing the automation of the scientific discovery process.

Demystifying Large Language Models for Medicine: A Primer

Large language models (LLMs) represent a transformative class of AI tools capable of revolutionizing various aspects of healthcare by generating human-like responses across diverse contexts and adapting to novel tasks following human instructions. Their potential application spans a broad range of medical tasks, such as clinical documentation, matching patients to clinical trials, and answering medical questions. In this primer paper, we propose an actionable guideline to help healthcare professionals more efficiently utilize LLMs in their work, along with a set of best practices. This approach consists of several main phases, including formulating the task, choosing LLMs, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and deployment. We start with the discussion of critical considerations in identifying healthcare tasks that align with the core capabilities of LLMs and selecting models based on the selected task and data, performance requirements, and model interface. We then review the strategies, such as prompt engineering and fine-tuning, to adapt standard LLMs to specialized medical tasks. Deployment considerations, including regulatory compliance, ethical guidelines, and continuous monitoring for fairness and bias, are also discussed. By providing a structured step-by-step methodology, this tutorial aims to equip healthcare professionals with the tools necessary to effectively integrate LLMs into clinical practice, ensuring that these powerful technologies are applied in a safe, reliable, and impactful manner.

Structural Causality-based Generalizable Concept Discovery Models

The rising need for explainable deep neural network architectures has utilized semantic concepts as explainable units. Several approaches utilizing disentangled representation learning estimate the generative factors and utilize them as concepts for explaining DNNs. However, even though the generative factors for a dataset remain fixed, concepts are not fixed entities and vary based on downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a disentanglement mechanism utilizing a variational autoencoder (VAE) for learning mutually independent generative factors for a given dataset and subsequently learning task-specific concepts using a structural causal model (SCM). Our method assumes generative factors and concepts to form a bipartite graph, with directed causal edges from generative factors to concepts. Experiments are conducted on datasets with known generative factors: D-sprites and Shapes3D. On specific downstream tasks, our proposed method successfully learns task-specific concepts which are explained well by the causal edges from the generative factors. Lastly, separate from current causal concept discovery methods, our methodology is generalizable to an arbitrary number of concepts and flexible to any downstream tasks.

ProtoNAM: Prototypical Neural Additive Models for Interpretable Deep Tabular Learning

Generalized additive models (GAMs) have long been a powerful white-box tool for the intelligible analysis of tabular data, revealing the influence of each feature on the model predictions. Despite the success of neural networks (NNs) in various domains, their application as NN-based GAMs in tabular data analysis remains suboptimal compared to tree-based ones, and the opacity of encoders in NN-GAMs also prevents users from understanding how networks learn the functions. In this work, we propose a new deep tabular learning method, termed Prototypical Neural Additive Model (ProtoNAM), which introduces prototypes into neural networks in the framework of GAMs. With the introduced prototype-based feature activation, ProtoNAM can flexibly model the irregular mapping from tabular features to the outputs while maintaining the explainability of the final prediction. We also propose a gradient-boosting inspired hierarchical shape function modeling method, facilitating the discovery of complex feature patterns and bringing transparency into the learning process of each network layer. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that ProtoNAM outperforms all existing NN-based GAMs, while providing additional insights into the shape function learned for each feature. The source code of ProtoNAM is available at \url{https://github.com/Teddy-XiongGZ/ProtoNAM}.

Benchmarking Spurious Bias in Few-Shot Image Classifiers

Few-shot image classifiers are designed to recognize and classify new data with minimal supervision and limited data but often show reliance on spurious correlations between classes and spurious attributes, known as spurious bias. Spurious correlations commonly hold in certain samples and few-shot classifiers can suffer from spurious bias induced from them. There is an absence of an automatic benchmarking system to assess the robustness of few-shot classifiers against spurious bias. In this paper, we propose a systematic and rigorous benchmark framework, termed FewSTAB, to fairly demonstrate and quantify varied degrees of robustness of few-shot classifiers to spurious bias. FewSTAB creates few-shot evaluation tasks with biased attributes so that using them for predictions can demonstrate poor performance. To construct these tasks, we propose attribute-based sample selection strategies based on a pre-trained vision-language model, eliminating the need for manual dataset curation. This allows FewSTAB to automatically benchmark spurious bias using any existing test data. FewSTAB offers evaluation results in a new dimension along with a new design guideline for building robust classifiers. Moreover, it can benchmark spurious bias in varied degrees and enable designs for varied degrees of robustness. Its effectiveness is demonstrated through experiments on ten few-shot learning methods across three datasets. We hope our framework can inspire new designs of robust few-shot classifiers. Our code is available at https://github.com/gtzheng/FewSTAB.

Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Medicine with Iterative Follow-up Questions

The emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in solving medical questions. They can possess considerable medical knowledge, but may still hallucinate and are inflexible in the knowledge updates. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proposed to enhance the medical question-answering capabilities of LLMs with external knowledge bases, it may still fail in complex cases where multiple rounds of information-seeking are required. To address such an issue, we propose iterative RAG for medicine (i-MedRAG), where LLMs can iteratively ask follow-up queries based on previous information-seeking attempts. In each iteration of i-MedRAG, the follow-up queries will be answered by a vanilla RAG system and they will be further used to guide the query generation in the next iteration. Our experiments show the improved performance of various LLMs brought by i-MedRAG compared with vanilla RAG on complex questions from clinical vignettes in the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), as well as various knowledge tests in the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) dataset. Notably, our zero-shot i-MedRAG outperforms all existing prompt engineering and fine-tuning methods on GPT-3.5, achieving an accuracy of 69.68\% on the MedQA dataset. In addition, we characterize the scaling properties of i-MedRAG with different iterations of follow-up queries and different numbers of queries per iteration. Our case studies show that i-MedRAG can flexibly ask follow-up queries to form reasoning chains, providing an in-depth analysis of medical questions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first-of-its-kind study on incorporating follow-up queries into medical RAG.

CoLiDR: Concept Learning using Aggregated Disentangled Representations

Interpretability of Deep Neural Networks using concept-based models offers a promising way to explain model behavior through human-understandable concepts. A parallel line of research focuses on disentangling the data distribution into its underlying generative factors, in turn explaining the data generation process. While both directions have received extensive attention, little work has been done on explaining concepts in terms of generative factors to unify mathematically disentangled representations and human-understandable concepts as an explanation for downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel method CoLiDR - which utilizes a disentangled representation learning setup for learning mutually independent generative factors and subsequently learns to aggregate the said representations into human-understandable concepts using a novel aggregation/decomposition module. Experiments are conducted on datasets with both known and unknown latent generative factors. Our method successfully aggregates disentangled generative factors into concepts while maintaining parity with state-of-the-art concept-based approaches. Quantitative and visual analysis of the learned aggregation procedure demonstrates the advantages of our work compared to commonly used concept-based models over four challenging datasets. Lastly, our work is generalizable to an arbitrary number of concepts and generative factors - making it flexible enough to be suitable for various types of data.

MM-SpuBench: Towards Better Understanding of Spurious Biases in Multimodal LLMs

Spurious bias, a tendency to use spurious correlations between non-essential input attributes and target variables for predictions, has revealed a severe robustness pitfall in deep learning models trained on single modality data. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which integrate both vision and language models, have demonstrated strong capability in joint vision-language understanding. However, whether spurious biases are prevalent in MLLMs remains under-explored. We mitigate this gap by analyzing the spurious biases in a multimodal setting, uncovering the specific test data patterns that can manifest this problem when biases in the vision model cascade into the alignment between visual and text tokens in MLLMs. To better understand this problem, we introduce MM-SpuBench, a comprehensive visual question-answering (VQA) benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs' reliance on nine distinct categories of spurious correlations from five open-source image datasets. The VQA dataset is built from human-understandable concept information (attributes). Leveraging this benchmark, we conduct a thorough evaluation of current state-of-the-art MLLMs. Our findings illuminate the persistence of the reliance on spurious correlations from these models and underscore the urge for new methodologies to mitigate spurious biases. To support the MLLM robustness research, we release our VQA benchmark at https://huggingface.co/datasets/mmbench/MM-SpuBench.

MedCalc-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models for Medical Calculations

As opposed to evaluating computation and logic-based reasoning, current bench2 marks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in medicine are primarily focused on question-answering involving domain knowledge and descriptive rea4 soning. While such qualitative capabilities are vital to medical diagnosis, in real5 world scenarios, doctors frequently use clinical calculators that follow quantitative equations and rule-based reasoning paradigms for evidence-based decision support. To this end, we propose MedCalc-Bench, a first-of-its-kind dataset focused on evaluating the medical calculation capability of LLMs. MedCalc-Bench contains an evaluation set of over 1000 manually reviewed instances from 55 different medical calculation tasks. Each instance in MedCalc-Bench consists of a patient note, a question requesting to compute a specific medical value, a ground truth answer, and a step-by-step explanation showing how the answer is obtained. While our evaluation results show the potential of LLMs in this area, none of them are effective enough for clinical settings. Common issues include extracting the incorrect entities, not using the correct equation or rules for a calculation task, or incorrectly performing the arithmetic for the computation. We hope our study highlights the quantitative knowledge and reasoning gaps in LLMs within medical settings, encouraging future improvements of LLMs for various clinical calculation tasks.