Touchstone Benchmark: Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating AI Algorithms for Medical Segmentation?

How can we test AI performance? This question seems trivial, but it isn't. Standard benchmarks often have problems such as in-distribution and small-size test sets, oversimplified metrics, unfair comparisons, and short-term outcome pressure. As a consequence, good performance on standard benchmarks does not guarantee success in real-world scenarios. To address these problems, we present Touchstone, a large-scale collaborative segmentation benchmark of 9 types of abdominal organs. This benchmark is based on 5,195 training CT scans from 76 hospitals around the world and 5,903 testing CT scans from 11 additional hospitals. This diverse test set enhances the statistical significance of benchmark results and rigorously evaluates AI algorithms across various out-of-distribution scenarios. We invited 14 inventors of 19 AI algorithms to train their algorithms, while our team, as a third party, independently evaluated these algorithms on three test sets. In addition, we also evaluated pre-existing AI frameworks--which, differing from algorithms, are more flexible and can support different algorithms--including MONAI from NVIDIA, nnU-Net from DKFZ, and numerous other open-source frameworks. We are committed to expanding this benchmark to encourage more innovation of AI algorithms for the medical domain.

A Novel Characterization of the Population Area Under the Risk Coverage Curve (AURC) and Rates of Finite Sample Estimators

The selective classifier (SC) has garnered increasing interest in areas such as medical diagnostics, autonomous driving, and the justice system. The Area Under the Risk-Coverage Curve (AURC) has emerged as the foremost evaluation metric for assessing the performance of SC systems. In this work, we introduce a more straightforward representation of the population AURC, interpretable as a weighted risk function, and propose a Monte Carlo plug-in estimator applicable to finite sample scenarios. We demonstrate that our estimator is consistent and offers a low-bias estimation of the actual weights, with a tightly bounded mean squared error (MSE). We empirically show the effectiveness of this estimator on a comprehensive benchmark across multiple datasets, model architectures, and Confidence Score Functions (CSFs).

AC-IND: Sparse CT reconstruction based on attenuation coefficient estimation and implicit neural distribution

Computed tomography (CT) reconstruction plays a crucial role in industrial nondestructive testing and medical diagnosis. Sparse view CT reconstruction aims to reconstruct high-quality CT images while only using a small number of projections, which helps to improve the detection speed of industrial assembly lines and is also meaningful for reducing radiation in medical scenarios. Sparse CT reconstruction methods based on implicit neural representations (INRs) have recently shown promising performance, but still produce artifacts because of the difficulty of obtaining useful prior information. In this work, we incorporate a powerful prior: the total number of material categories of objects. To utilize the prior, we design AC-IND, a self-supervised method based on Attenuation Coefficient Estimation and Implicit Neural Distribution. Specifically, our method first transforms the traditional INR from scalar mapping to probability distribution mapping. Then we design a compact attenuation coefficient estimator initialized with values from a rough reconstruction and fast segmentation. Finally, our algorithm finishes the CT reconstruction by jointly optimizing the estimator and the generated distribution. Through experiments, we find that our method not only outperforms the comparative methods in sparse CT reconstruction but also can automatically generate semantic segmentation maps.

Redundancy-Aware Camera Selection for Indoor Scene Neural Rendering

Novel view synthesis of indoor scenes can be achieved by capturing a monocular video sequence of the environment. However, redundant information caused by artificial movements in the input video data reduces the efficiency of scene modeling. In this work, we tackle this challenge from the perspective of camera selection. We begin by constructing a similarity matrix that incorporates both the spatial diversity of the cameras and the semantic variation of the images. Based on this matrix, we use the Intra-List Diversity (ILD) metric to assess camera redundancy, formulating the camera selection task as an optimization problem. Then we apply a diversity-based sampling algorithm to optimize the camera selection. We also develop a new dataset, IndoorTraj, which includes long and complex camera movements captured by humans in virtual indoor environments, closely mimicking real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our strategy outperforms other approaches under time and memory constraints. Remarkably, our method achieves performance comparable to models trained on the full dataset, while using only an average of 15% of the frames and 75% of the allotted time.

Efficient Expert Pruning for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Language Models: Enhancing Performance and Reducing Inference Costs

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to architectures with billions to trillions of parameters, posing significant deployment challenges due to their substantial demands on memory, processing power, and energy consumption. Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures have emerged as a solution, activating only a subset of parameters per token, thereby achieving faster inference while maintaining performance. However, SMoE models still face limitations in broader deployment due to their large parameter counts and significant GPU memory requirements. In this work, we introduce a gradient-free evolutionary strategy named EEP (Efficient Expert P}runing) to enhance the pruning of experts in SMoE models. EEP relies solely on model inference (i.e., no gradient computation) and achieves greater sparsity while maintaining or even improving performance on downstream tasks. EEP can be used to reduce both the total number of experts (thus saving GPU memory) and the number of active experts (thus accelerating inference). For example, we demonstrate that pruning up to 75% of experts in Mixtral $8\times7$B-Instruct results in a substantial reduction in parameters with minimal performance loss. Remarkably, we observe improved performance on certain tasks, such as a significant increase in accuracy on the SQuAD dataset (from 53.4% to 75.4%), when pruning half of the experts. With these results, EEP not only lowers the barrier to deploying SMoE models,but also challenges the conventional understanding of model pruning by showing that fewer experts can lead to better task-specific performance without any fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/imagination-research/EEP.

FastMem: Fast Memorization of Prompt Improves Context Awareness of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel in generating coherent text, but they often struggle with context awareness, leading to inaccuracies in tasks requiring faithful adherence to provided information. We introduce FastMem, a novel method designed to enhance instruction fine-tuned LLMs' context awareness through fast memorization of the prompt. FastMem maximizes the likelihood of the prompt before inference by fine-tuning only the last Feed-Forward Network (FFN) module. This targeted approach ensures efficient optimization without overfitting, significantly improving the model's ability to comprehend and accurately follow the context. Our experiments demonstrate substantial gains in reading comprehension, text summarization and adherence to output structures. For instance, FastMem improves the accuracy of Llama 3-8B-Inst on the NQ-SWAP dataset from 59.1% to 71.6%, and reduces the output structure failure rate of Qwen 1.5-4B-Chat from 34.9% to 25.5%. Extensive experimental results highlight FastMem's potential to offer a robust solution to enhance the reliability and accuracy of LLMs in various applications. Our code is available at: https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/FastMem

Can LLMs Learn by Teaching? A Preliminary Study

Teaching to improve student models (e.g., knowledge distillation) is an extensively studied methodology in LLMs. However, for humans, teaching not only improves students but also improves teachers. We ask: Can LLMs also learn by teaching (LbT)? If yes, we can potentially unlock the possibility of continuously advancing the models without solely relying on human-produced data or stronger models. In this paper, we provide a preliminary exploration of this ambitious agenda. We show that LbT ideas can be incorporated into existing LLM training/prompting pipelines and provide noticeable improvements. Specifically, we design three methods, each mimicking one of the three levels of LbT in humans: observing students' feedback, learning from the feedback, and learning iteratively, with the goals of improving answer accuracy without training and improving models' inherent capability with fine-tuning. The findings are encouraging. For example, similar to LbT in human, we see that: (1) LbT can induce weak-to-strong generalization: strong models can improve themselves by teaching other weak models; (2) Diversity in students might help: teaching multiple students could be better than teaching one student or the teacher itself. We hope that this early promise can inspire future research on LbT and more broadly adopting the advanced techniques in education to improve LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/imagination-research/lbt.

A Generic Method for Fine-grained Category Discovery in Natural Language Texts

Fine-grained category discovery using only coarse-grained supervision is a cost-effective yet challenging task. Previous training methods focus on aligning query samples with positive samples and distancing them from negatives. They often neglect intra-category and inter-category semantic similarities of fine-grained categories when navigating sample distributions in the embedding space. Furthermore, some evaluation techniques that rely on pre-collected test samples are inadequate for real-time applications. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a method that successfully detects fine-grained clusters of semantically similar texts guided by a novel objective function. The method uses semantic similarities in a logarithmic space to guide sample distributions in the Euclidean space and to form distinct clusters that represent fine-grained categories. We also propose a centroid inference mechanism to support real-time applications. The efficacy of the method is both theoretically justified and empirically confirmed on three benchmark tasks. The proposed objective function is integrated in multiple contrastive learning based neural models. Its results surpass existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of Accuracy, Adjusted Rand Index and Normalized Mutual Information of the detected fine-grained categories. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/XX upon publication.

Implicit Neural Representations for Robust Joint Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Computed Tomography (CT) is pivotal in industrial quality control and medical diagnostics. Sparse-view CT, offering reduced ionizing radiation, faces challenges due to its under-sampled nature, leading to ill-posed reconstruction problems. Recent advancements in Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have shown promise in addressing sparse-view CT reconstruction. Recognizing that CT often involves scanning similar subjects, we propose a novel approach to improve reconstruction quality through joint reconstruction of multiple objects using INRs. This approach can potentially leverage both the strengths of INRs and the statistical regularities across multiple objects. While current INR joint reconstruction techniques primarily focus on accelerating convergence via meta-initialization, they are not specifically tailored to enhance reconstruction quality. To address this gap, we introduce a novel INR-based Bayesian framework integrating latent variables to capture the inter-object relationships. These variables serve as a dynamic reference throughout the optimization, thereby enhancing individual reconstruction fidelity. Our extensive experiments, which assess various key factors such as reconstruction quality, resistance to overfitting, and generalizability, demonstrate significant improvements over baselines in common numerical metrics. This underscores a notable advancement in CT reconstruction methods.

Linear Combination of Saved Checkpoints Makes Consistency and Diffusion Models Better

Diffusion Models (DM) and Consistency Models (CM) are two types of popular generative models with good generation quality on various tasks. When training DM and CM, intermediate weight checkpoints are not fully utilized and only the last converged checkpoint is used. In this work, we find that high-quality model weights often lie in a basin which cannot be reached by SGD but can be obtained by proper checkpoint averaging. Based on these observations, we propose LCSC, a simple but effective and efficient method to enhance the performance of DM and CM, by combining checkpoints along the training trajectory with coefficients deduced from evolutionary search. We demonstrate the value of LCSC through two use cases: $\textbf{(a) Reducing training cost.}$ With LCSC, we only need to train DM/CM with fewer number of iterations and/or lower batch sizes to obtain comparable sample quality with the fully trained model. For example, LCSC achieves considerable training speedups for CM (23$\times$ on CIFAR-10 and 15$\times$ on ImageNet-64). $\textbf{(b) Enhancing pre-trained models.}$ Assuming full training is already done, LCSC can further improve the generation quality or speed of the final converged models. For example, LCSC achieves better performance using 1 number of function evaluation (NFE) than the base model with 2 NFE on consistency distillation, and decreases the NFE of DM from 15 to 9 while maintaining the generation quality on CIFAR-10. Our code is available at https://github.com/imagination-research/LCSC.