Predicting Company Growth by Econophysics informed Machine Learning

Predicting company growth is crucial for strategic adjustment, operational decision-making, risk assessment, and loan eligibility reviews. Traditional models for company growth often focus too much on theory, overlooking practical forecasting, or they rely solely on time series forecasting techniques, ignoring interpretability and the inherent mechanisms of company growth. In this paper, we propose a machine learning-based prediction framework that incorporates an econophysics model for company growth. Our model captures both the intrinsic growth mechanisms of companies led by scaling laws and the fluctuations influenced by random factors and individual decisions, demonstrating superior predictive performance compared with methods that use time series techniques alone. Its advantages are more pronounced in long-range prediction tasks. By explicitly modeling the baseline growth and volatility components, our model is more interpretable.

DrHouse: An LLM-empowered Diagnostic Reasoning System through Harnessing Outcomes from Sensor Data and Expert Knowledge

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to transform digital healthcare, as evidenced by recent advances in LLM-based virtual doctors. However, current approaches rely on patient's subjective descriptions of symptoms, causing increased misdiagnosis. Recognizing the value of daily data from smart devices, we introduce a novel LLM-based multi-turn consultation virtual doctor system, DrHouse, which incorporates three significant contributions: 1) It utilizes sensor data from smart devices in the diagnosis process, enhancing accuracy and reliability. 2) DrHouse leverages continuously updating medical databases such as Up-to-Date and PubMed to ensure our model remains at diagnostic standard's forefront. 3) DrHouse introduces a novel diagnostic algorithm that concurrently evaluates potential diseases and their likelihood, facilitating more nuanced and informed medical assessments. Through multi-turn interactions, DrHouse determines the next steps, such as accessing daily data from smart devices or requesting in-lab tests, and progressively refines its diagnoses. Evaluations on three public datasets and our self-collected datasets show that DrHouse can achieve up to an 18.8% increase in diagnosis accuracy over the state-of-the-art baselines. The results of a 32-participant user study show that 75% medical experts and 91.7% patients are willing to use DrHouse.

VIAssist: Adapting Multi-modal Large Language Models for Users with Visual Impairments

Individuals with visual impairments, encompassing both partial and total difficulties in visual perception, are referred to as visually impaired (VI) people. An estimated 2.2 billion individuals worldwide are affected by visual impairments. Recent advancements in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have showcased their extraordinary capabilities across various domains. It is desirable to help VI individuals with MLLMs' great capabilities of visual understanding and reasoning. However, it is challenging for VI people to use MLLMs due to the difficulties in capturing the desirable images to fulfill their daily requests. For example, the target object is not fully or partially placed in the image. This paper explores how to leverage MLLMs for VI individuals to provide visual-question answers. VIAssist can identify undesired images and provide detailed actions. Finally, VIAssist can provide reliable answers to users' queries based on the images. Our results show that VIAssist provides +0.21 and +0.31 higher BERTScore and ROUGE scores than the baseline, respectively.

Emergence and Causality in Complex Systems: A Survey on Causal Emergence and Related Quantitative Studies

Emergence and causality are two fundamental concepts for understanding complex systems. They are interconnected. On one hand, emergence refers to the phenomenon where macroscopic properties cannot be solely attributed to the cause of individual properties. On the other hand, causality can exhibit emergence, meaning that new causal laws may arise as we increase the level of abstraction. Causal emergence theory aims to bridge these two concepts and even employs measures of causality to quantify emergence. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent advancements in quantitative theories and applications of causal emergence. Two key problems are addressed: quantifying causal emergence and identifying it in data. Addressing the latter requires the use of machine learning techniques, thus establishing a connection between causal emergence and artificial intelligence. We highlighted that the architectures used for identifying causal emergence are shared by causal representation learning, causal model abstraction, and world model-based reinforcement learning. Consequently, progress in any of these areas can benefit the others. Potential applications and future perspectives are also discussed in the final section of the review.

Finding emergence in data: causal emergence inspired dynamics learning

Modelling complex dynamical systems in a data-driven manner is challenging due to the presence of emergent behaviors and properties that cannot be directly captured by micro-level observational data. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a model that can effectively capture emergent dynamics at the macro-level and quantify emergence based on the available data. Drawing inspiration from the theory of causal emergence, this paper introduces a machine learning framework aimed at learning macro-dynamics within an emergent latent space. The framework achieves this by maximizing the effective information (EI) to obtain a macro-dynamics model with stronger causal effects. Experimental results on both simulated and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Not only does it successfully capture emergent patterns, but it also learns the coarse-graining strategy and quantifies the degree of causal emergence in the data. Furthermore, experiments conducted on environments different from the training dataset highlight the superior generalization ability of our model.