Carl
Abstract:Non-invasive patient monitoring for tracking and predicting adverse acute health events is an emerging area of research. We pursue in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA) prediction using only single-channel finger photoplethysmography (PPG) signals. Our proposed two-stage model Feature Extractor-Aggregator Network (FEAN) leverages powerful representations from pre-trained PPG foundation models (PPG-GPT of size up to 1 Billion) stacked with sequential classification models. We propose two FEAN variants ("1H", "FH") which use the latest one-hour and (max) 24-hour history to make decisions respectively. Our study is the first to present IHCA prediction results in ICU patients using only unimodal (continuous PPG signal) waveform deep representations. With our best model, we obtain an average of 0.79 AUROC over 24~h prediction window before CA event onset with our model peaking performance at 0.82 one hour before CA. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of our model through architectural tuning and PaCMAP visualization of patient health trajectory in latent space.
Abstract:Early prediction of pediatric cardiac arrest (CA) is critical for timely intervention in high-risk intensive care settings. We introduce PedCA-FT, a novel transformer-based framework that fuses tabular view of EHR with the derived textual view of EHR to fully unleash the interactions of high-dimensional risk factors and their dynamics. By employing dedicated transformer modules for each modality view, PedCA-FT captures complex temporal and contextual patterns to produce robust CA risk estimates. Evaluated on a curated pediatric cohort from the CHOA-CICU database, our approach outperforms ten other artificial intelligence models across five key performance metrics and identifies clinically meaningful risk factors. These findings underscore the potential of multimodal fusion techniques to enhance early CA detection and improve patient care.
Abstract:Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved notable success in multimodal tasks but face practical limitations due to the quadratic complexity of decoder attention mechanisms and autoregressive generation. Existing methods like FASTV and VTW have achieved notable results in reducing redundant visual tokens, but these approaches focus on pruning tokens in a single forward pass without systematically analyzing the redundancy of visual tokens throughout the entire generation process. In this paper, we introduce a dynamic pruning strategy tailored for VLMs, namedDynamic Rate (DyRate), which progressively adjusts the compression rate during generation. Our analysis of the distribution of attention reveals that the importance of visual tokens decreases throughout the generation process, inspiring us to adopt a more aggressive compression rate. By integrating a lightweight predictor based on attention distribution, our approach enables flexible adjustment of pruning rates based on the attention distribution. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method not only reduces computational demands but also maintains the quality of responses.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have become integral tool for users from various backgrounds. LLMs, trained on vast corpora, reflect the linguistic and cultural nuances embedded in their pre-training data. However, the values and perspectives inherent in this data can influence the behavior of LLMs, leading to potential biases. As a result, the use of LLMs in contexts involving spiritual or moral values necessitates careful consideration of these underlying biases. Our work starts with verification of our hypothesis by testing the spiritual values of popular LLMs. Experimental results show that LLMs' spiritual values are quite diverse, as opposed to the stereotype of atheists or secularists. We then investigate how different spiritual values affect LLMs in social-fairness scenarios e.g., hate speech identification). Our findings reveal that different spiritual values indeed lead to different sensitivity to different hate target groups. Furthermore, we propose to continue pre-training LLMs on spiritual texts, and empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in mitigating spiritual bias.
Abstract:Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) is widely used in statistics and machine learning for prediction tasks requiring uncertainty measures. Its efficacy depends on the appropriate specification of the mean function, covariance kernel function, and associated hyperparameters. Severe misspecifications can lead to inaccurate results and problematic consequences, especially in safety-critical applications. However, a systematic approach to handle these misspecifications is lacking in the literature. In this work, we propose a general framework to address these issues. Firstly, we introduce a flexible two-stage GPR framework that separates mean prediction and uncertainty quantification (UQ) to prevent mean misspecification, which can introduce bias into the model. Secondly, kernel function misspecification is addressed through a novel automatic kernel search algorithm, supported by theoretical analysis, that selects the optimal kernel from a candidate set. Additionally, we propose a subsampling-based warm-start strategy for hyperparameter initialization to improve efficiency and avoid hyperparameter misspecification. With much lower computational cost, our subsampling-based strategy can yield competitive or better performance than training exclusively on the full dataset. Combining all these components, we recommend two GPR methods-exact and scalable-designed to match available computational resources and specific UQ requirements. Extensive evaluation on real-world datasets, including UCI benchmarks and a safety-critical medical case study, demonstrates the robustness and precision of our methods.
Abstract:Linking (aligning) biomedical concepts across diverse data sources enables various integrative analyses, but it is challenging due to the discrepancies in concept naming conventions. Various strategies have been developed to overcome this challenge, such as those based on string-matching rules, manually crafted thesauri, and machine learning models. However, these methods are constrained by limited prior biomedical knowledge and can hardly generalize beyond the limited amounts of rules, thesauri, or training samples. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive results in diverse biomedical NLP tasks due to their unprecedentedly rich prior knowledge and strong zero-shot prediction abilities. However, LLMs suffer from issues including high costs, limited context length, and unreliable predictions. In this research, we propose PromptLink, a novel biomedical concept linking framework that leverages LLMs. It first employs a biomedical-specialized pre-trained language model to generate candidate concepts that can fit in the LLM context windows. Then it utilizes an LLM to link concepts through two-stage prompts, where the first-stage prompt aims to elicit the biomedical prior knowledge from the LLM for the concept linking task and the second-stage prompt enforces the LLM to reflect on its own predictions to further enhance their reliability. Empirical results on the concept linking task between two EHR datasets and an external biomedical KG demonstrate the effectiveness of PromptLink. Furthermore, PromptLink is a generic framework without reliance on additional prior knowledge, context, or training data, making it well-suited for concept linking across various types of data sources. The source code is available at https://github.com/constantjxyz/PromptLink.
Abstract:Logic reasoning has been critically needed in problem-solving and decision-making. Although Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated capabilities of handling multiple reasoning tasks (e.g., commonsense reasoning), their ability to reason complex mathematical problems, specifically propositional logic, remains largely underexplored. This lack of exploration can be attributed to the limited availability of annotated corpora. Here, we present a well-labeled propositional logic corpus, LogicPrpBank, containing 7093 Propositional Logic Statements (PLSs) across six mathematical subjects, to study a brand-new task of reasoning logical implication and equivalence. We benchmark LogicPrpBank with widely-used LMs to show that our corpus offers a useful resource for this challenging task and there is ample room for model improvement.
Abstract:Recently, Large Language Model based Autonomous system(LLMAS) has gained great popularity for its potential to simulate complicated behaviors of human societies. One of its main challenges is to present and analyze the dynamic events evolution of LLMAS. In this work, we present a visualization approach to explore detailed statuses and agents' behavior within LLMAS. We propose a general pipeline that establishes a behavior structure from raw LLMAS execution events, leverages a behavior summarization algorithm to construct a hierarchical summary of the entire structure in terms of time sequence, and a cause trace method to mine the causal relationship between agent behaviors. We then develop AgentLens, a visual analysis system that leverages a hierarchical temporal visualization for illustrating the evolution of LLMAS, and supports users to interactively investigate details and causes of agents' behaviors. Two usage scenarios and a user study demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our AgentLens.
Abstract:The field of healthcare has increasingly turned its focus towards Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their remarkable performance. However, their performance in actual clinical applications has been underexplored. Traditional evaluations based on question-answering tasks don't fully capture the nuanced contexts. This gap highlights the need for more in-depth and practical assessments of LLMs in real-world healthcare settings. Objective: We sought to evaluate the performance of LLMs in the complex clinical context of adult critical care medicine using systematic and comprehensible analytic methods, including clinician annotation and adjudication. Methods: We investigated the performance of three general LLMs in understanding and processing real-world clinical notes. Concepts from 150 clinical notes were identified by MetaMap and then labeled by 9 clinicians. Each LLM's proficiency was evaluated by identifying the temporality and negation of these concepts using different prompts for an in-depth analysis. Results: GPT-4 showed overall superior performance compared to other LLMs. In contrast, both GPT-3.5 and text-davinci-003 exhibit enhanced performance when the appropriate prompting strategies are employed. The GPT family models have demonstrated considerable efficiency, evidenced by their cost-effectiveness and time-saving capabilities. Conclusion: A comprehensive qualitative performance evaluation framework for LLMs is developed and operationalized. This framework goes beyond singular performance aspects. With expert annotations, this methodology not only validates LLMs' capabilities in processing complex medical data but also establishes a benchmark for future LLM evaluations across specialized domains.
Abstract:The burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by sophisticated models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. These models, however, bring forth substantial challenges in the high consumption of computational, memory, energy, and financial resources, especially in environments with limited resource capabilities. This survey aims to systematically address these challenges by reviewing a broad spectrum of techniques designed to enhance the resource efficiency of LLMs. We categorize methods based on their optimization focus: computational, memory, energy, financial, and network resources and their applicability across various stages of an LLM's lifecycle, including architecture design, pretraining, finetuning, and system design. Additionally, the survey introduces a nuanced categorization of resource efficiency techniques by their specific resource types, which uncovers the intricate relationships and mappings between various resources and corresponding optimization techniques. A standardized set of evaluation metrics and datasets is also presented to facilitate consistent and fair comparisons across different models and techniques. By offering a comprehensive overview of the current sota and identifying open research avenues, this survey serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners, aiding them in developing more sustainable and efficient LLMs in a rapidly evolving landscape.