DySpec: Faster Speculative Decoding with Dynamic Token Tree Structure

While speculative decoding has recently appeared as a promising direction for accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs), the speedup and scalability are strongly bounded by the token acceptance rate. Prevalent methods usually organize predicted tokens as independent chains or fixed token trees, which fails to generalize to diverse query distributions. In this paper, we propose DySpec, a faster speculative decoding algorithm with a novel dynamic token tree structure. We begin by bridging the draft distribution and acceptance rate from intuitive and empirical clues, and successfully show that the two variables are strongly correlated. Based on this, we employ a greedy strategy to dynamically expand the token tree at run time. Theoretically, we show that our method can achieve optimal results under mild assumptions. Empirically, DySpec yields a higher acceptance rate and speedup than fixed trees. DySpec can drastically improve the throughput and reduce the latency of token generation across various data distribution and model sizes, which significantly outperforms strong competitors, including Specinfer and Sequoia. Under low temperature setting, DySpec can improve the throughput up to 9.1$\times$ and reduce the latency up to 9.4$\times$ on Llama2-70B. Under high temperature setting, DySpec can also improve the throughput up to 6.21$\times$, despite the increasing difficulty of speculating more than one token per step for draft model.

MedDiT: A Knowledge-Controlled Diffusion Transformer Framework for Dynamic Medical Image Generation in Virtual Simulated Patient

Medical education relies heavily on Simulated Patients (SPs) to provide a safe environment for students to practice clinical skills, including medical image analysis. However, the high cost of recruiting qualified SPs and the lack of diverse medical imaging datasets have presented significant challenges. To address these issues, this paper introduces MedDiT, a novel knowledge-controlled conversational framework that can dynamically generate plausible medical images aligned with simulated patient symptoms, enabling diverse diagnostic skill training. Specifically, MedDiT integrates various patient Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which describe the attributes and symptoms of patients, to dynamically prompt Large Language Models' (LLMs) behavior and control the patient characteristics, mitigating hallucination during medical conversation. Additionally, a well-tuned Diffusion Transformer (DiT) model is incorporated to generate medical images according to the specified patient attributes in the KG. In this paper, we present the capabilities of MedDiT through a practical demonstration, showcasing its ability to act in diverse simulated patient cases and generate the corresponding medical images. This can provide an abundant and interactive learning experience for students, advancing medical education by offering an immersive simulation platform for future healthcare professionals. The work sheds light on the feasibility of incorporating advanced technologies like LLM, KG, and DiT in education applications, highlighting their potential to address the challenges faced in simulated patient-based medical education.

MMPKUBase: A Comprehensive and High-quality Chinese Multi-modal Knowledge Graph

Multi-modal knowledge graphs have emerged as a powerful approach for information representation, combining data from different modalities such as text, images, and videos. While several such graphs have been constructed and have played important roles in applications like visual question answering and recommendation systems, challenges persist in their development. These include the scarcity of high-quality Chinese knowledge graphs and limited domain coverage in existing multi-modal knowledge graphs. This paper introduces MMPKUBase, a robust and extensive Chinese multi-modal knowledge graph that covers diverse domains, including birds, mammals, ferns, and more, comprising over 50,000 entities and over 1 million filtered images. To ensure data quality, we employ Prototypical Contrastive Learning and the Isolation Forest algorithm to refine the image data. Additionally, we have developed a user-friendly platform to facilitate image attribute exploration.

Combining Optimal Transport and Embedding-Based Approaches for More Expressiveness in Unsupervised Graph Alignment

Unsupervised graph alignment finds the one-to-one node correspondence between a pair of attributed graphs by only exploiting graph structure and node features. One category of existing works first computes the node representation and then matches nodes with close embeddings, which is intuitive but lacks a clear objective tailored for graph alignment in the unsupervised setting. The other category reduces the problem to optimal transport (OT) via Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) learning with a well-defined objective but leaves a large room for exploring the design of transport cost. We propose a principled approach to combine their advantages motivated by theoretical analysis of model expressiveness. By noticing the limitation of discriminative power in separating matched and unmatched node pairs, we improve the cost design of GW learning with feature transformation, which enables feature interaction across dimensions. Besides, we propose a simple yet effective embedding-based heuristic inspired by the Weisfeiler-Lehman test and add its prior knowledge to OT for more expressiveness when handling non-Euclidean data. Moreover, we are the first to guarantee the one-to-one matching constraint by reducing the problem to maximum weight matching. The algorithm design effectively combines our OT and embedding-based predictions via stacking, an ensemble learning strategy. We propose a model framework named \texttt{CombAlign} integrating all the above modules to refine node alignment progressively. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate significant improvements in alignment accuracy compared to state-of-the-art approaches and validate the effectiveness of the proposed modules.

Leveraging Large Language Model as Simulated Patients for Clinical Education

Simulated Patients (SPs) play a crucial role in clinical medical education by providing realistic scenarios for student practice. However, the high cost of training and hiring qualified SPs, along with the heavy workload and potential risks they face in consistently portraying actual patients, limit students' access to this type of clinical training. Consequently, the integration of computer program-based simulated patients has emerged as a valuable educational tool in recent years. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), their exceptional capabilities in conversational artificial intelligence and role-playing have been demonstrated, making them a feasible option for implementing Virtual Simulated Patient (VSP). In this paper, we present an integrated model-agnostic framework called CureFun that harnesses the potential of LLMs in clinical medical education. This framework facilitates natural conversations between students and simulated patients, evaluates their dialogue, and provides suggestions to enhance students' clinical inquiry skills. Through comprehensive evaluations, our approach demonstrates more authentic and professional SP-scenario dialogue flows compared to other LLM-based chatbots, thus proving its proficiency in simulating patients. Additionally, leveraging CureFun's evaluation ability, we assess several medical LLMs and discuss the possibilities and limitations of using LLMs as virtual doctors from the perspective of their diagnostic abilities.

LLMaAA: Making Large Language Models as Active Annotators

Prevalent supervised learning methods in natural language processing (NLP) are notoriously data-hungry, which demand large amounts of high-quality annotated data. In practice, acquiring such data is a costly endeavor. Recently, the superior few-shot performance of large language models (LLMs) has propelled the development of dataset generation, where the training data are solely synthesized from LLMs. However, such an approach usually suffers from low-quality issues, and requires orders of magnitude more labeled data to achieve satisfactory performance. To fully exploit the potential of LLMs and make use of massive unlabeled data, we propose LLMaAA, which takes LLMs as annotators and puts them into an active learning loop to determine what to annotate efficiently. To learn robustly with pseudo labels, we optimize both the annotation and training processes: (1) we draw k-NN examples from a small demonstration pool as in-context examples, and (2) we adopt the example reweighting technique to assign training samples with learnable weights. Compared with previous approaches, LLMaAA features both efficiency and reliability. We conduct experiments and analysis on two classic NLP tasks, named entity recognition and relation extraction. With LLMaAA, task-specific models trained from LLM-generated labels can outperform the teacher within only hundreds of annotated examples, which is much more cost-effective than other baselines.

Two is Better Than One: Answering Complex Questions by Multiple Knowledge Sources with Generalized Links

Incorporating multiple knowledge sources is proven to be beneficial for answering complex factoid questions. To utilize multiple knowledge bases (KB), previous works merge all KBs into a single graph via entity alignment and reduce the problem to question-answering (QA) over the fused KB. In reality, various link relations between KBs might be adopted in QA over multi-KBs. In addition to the identity between the alignable entities (i.e. full link), unalignable entities expressing the different aspects or types of an abstract concept may also be treated identical in a question (i.e. partial link). Hence, the KB fusion in prior works fails to represent all types of links, restricting their ability to comprehend multi-KBs for QA. In this work, we formulate the novel Multi-KB-QA task that leverages the full and partial links among multiple KBs to derive correct answers, a benchmark with diversified link and query types is also constructed to efficiently evaluate Multi-KB-QA performance. Finally, we propose a method for Multi-KB-QA that encodes all link relations in the KB embedding to score and rank candidate answers. Experiments show that our method markedly surpasses conventional KB-QA systems in Multi-KB-QA, justifying the necessity of devising this task.

ADMUS: A Progressive Question Answering Framework Adaptable to Multiple Knowledge Sources

With the introduction of deep learning models, semantic parsingbased knowledge base question answering (KBQA) systems have achieved high performance in handling complex questions. However, most existing approaches primarily focus on enhancing the model's effectiveness on individual benchmark datasets, disregarding the high costs of adapting the system to disparate datasets in real-world scenarios (e.g., multi-tenant platform). Therefore, we present ADMUS, a progressive knowledge base question answering framework designed to accommodate a wide variety of datasets, including multiple languages, diverse backbone knowledge bases, and disparate question answering datasets. To accomplish the purpose, we decouple the architecture of conventional KBQA systems and propose this dataset-independent framework. Our framework supports the seamless integration of new datasets with minimal effort, only requiring creating a dataset-related micro-service at a negligible cost. To enhance the usability of ADUMS, we design a progressive framework consisting of three stages, ranges from executing exact queries, generating approximate queries and retrieving open-domain knowledge referring from large language models. An online demonstration of ADUMS is available at: https://answer.gstore.cn/pc/index.html

TopoBERT: Plug and Play Toponym Recognition Module Harnessing Fine-tuned BERT

Extracting precise geographical information from textual contents is crucial in a plethora of applications. For example, during hazardous events, a robust and unbiased toponym extraction framework can provide an avenue to tie the location concerned to the topic discussed by news media posts and pinpoint humanitarian help requests or damage reports from social media. Early studies have leveraged rule-based, gazetteer-based, deep learning, and hybrid approaches to address this problem. However, the performance of existing tools is deficient in supporting operations like emergency rescue, which relies on fine-grained, accurate geographic information. The emerging pretrained language models can better capture the underlying characteristics of text information, including place names, offering a promising pathway to optimize toponym recognition to underpin practical applications. In this paper, TopoBERT, a toponym recognition module based on a one dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN1D) and Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT), is proposed and fine-tuned. Three datasets (CoNLL2003-Train, Wikipedia3000, WNUT2017) are leveraged to tune the hyperparameters, discover the best training strategy, and train the model. Another two datasets (CoNLL2003-Test and Harvey2017) are used to evaluate the performance. Three distinguished classifiers, linear, multi-layer perceptron, and CNN1D, are benchmarked to determine the optimal model architecture. TopoBERT achieves state-of-the-art performance (f1-score=0.865) compared to the other five baseline models and can be applied to diverse toponym recognition tasks without additional training.

VGStore: A Multimodal Extension to SPARQL for Querying RDF Scene Graph

Semantic Web technology has successfully facilitated many RDF models with rich data representation methods. It also has the potential ability to represent and store multimodal knowledge bases such as multimodal scene graphs. However, most existing query languages, especially SPARQL, barely explore the implicit multimodal relationships like semantic similarity, spatial relations, etc. We first explored this issue by organizing a large-scale scene graph dataset, namely Visual Genome, in the RDF graph database. Based on the proposed RDF-stored multimodal scene graph, we extended SPARQL queries to answer questions containing relational reasoning about color, spatial, etc. Further demo (i.e., VGStore) shows the effectiveness of customized queries and displaying multimodal data.