Take Your Steps: Hierarchically Efficient Pulmonary Disease Screening via CT Volume Compression

Deep learning models are widely used to process Computed Tomography (CT) data in the automated screening of pulmonary diseases, significantly reducing the workload of physicians. However, the three-dimensional nature of CT volumes involves an excessive number of voxels, which significantly increases the complexity of model processing. Previous screening approaches often overlook this issue, which undoubtedly reduces screening efficiency. Towards efficient and effective screening, we design a hierarchical approach to reduce the computational cost of pulmonary disease screening. The new approach re-organizes the screening workflows into three steps. First, we propose a Computed Tomography Volume Compression (CTVC) method to select a small slice subset that comprehensively represents the whole CT volume. Second, the selected CT slices are used to detect pulmonary diseases coarsely via a lightweight classification model. Third, an uncertainty measurement strategy is applied to identify samples with low diagnostic confidence, which are re-detected by radiologists. Experiments on two public pulmonary disease datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable accuracy and recall while reducing the time by 50%-70% compared with the counterparts using full CT volumes. Besides, we also found that our approach outperforms previous cutting-edge CTVC methods in retaining important indications after compression.

Enhancing Semi-Supervised Learning via Representative and Diverse Sample Selection

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) has become a preferred paradigm in many deep learning tasks, which reduces the need for human labor. Previous studies primarily focus on effectively utilising the labelled and unlabeled data to improve performance. However, we observe that how to select samples for labelling also significantly impacts performance, particularly under extremely low-budget settings. The sample selection task in SSL has been under-explored for a long time. To fill in this gap, we propose a Representative and Diverse Sample Selection approach (RDSS). By adopting a modified Frank-Wolfe algorithm to minimise a novel criterion $\alpha$-Maximum Mean Discrepancy ($\alpha$-MMD), RDSS samples a representative and diverse subset for annotation from the unlabeled data. We demonstrate that minimizing $\alpha$-MMD enhances the generalization ability of low-budget learning. Experimental results show that RDSS consistently improves the performance of several popular SSL frameworks and outperforms the state-of-the-art sample selection approaches used in Active Learning (AL) and Semi-Supervised Active Learning (SSAL), even with constrained annotation budgets.

TeleOR: Real-time Telemedicine System for Full-Scene Operating Room

The advent of telemedicine represents a transformative development in leveraging technology to extend the reach of specialized medical expertise to remote surgeries, a field where the immediacy of expert guidance is paramount. However, the intricate dynamics of Operating Room (OR) scene pose unique challenges for telemedicine, particularly in achieving high-fidelity, real-time scene reconstruction and transmission amidst obstructions and bandwidth limitations. This paper introduces TeleOR, a pioneering system designed to address these challenges through real-time OR scene reconstruction for Tele-intervention. TeleOR distinguishes itself with three innovative approaches: dynamic self-calibration, which leverages inherent scene features for calibration without the need for preset markers, allowing for obstacle avoidance and real-time camera adjustment; selective OR reconstruction, focusing on dynamically changing scene segments to reduce reconstruction complexity; and viewport-adaptive transmission, optimizing data transmission based on real-time client feedback to efficiently deliver high-quality 3D reconstructions within bandwidth constraints. Comprehensive experiments on the 4D-OR surgical scene dataset demostrate the superiority and applicability of TeleOR, illuminating the potential to revolutionize tele-interventions by overcoming the spatial and technical barriers inherent in remote surgical guidance.

Imitating Cost-Constrained Behaviors in Reinforcement Learning

Complex planning and scheduling problems have long been solved using various optimization or heuristic approaches. In recent years, imitation learning that aims to learn from expert demonstrations has been proposed as a viable alternative to solving these problems. Generally speaking, imitation learning is designed to learn either the reward (or preference) model or directly the behavioral policy by observing the behavior of an expert. Existing work in imitation learning and inverse reinforcement learning has focused on imitation primarily in unconstrained settings (e.g., no limit on fuel consumed by the vehicle). However, in many real-world domains, the behavior of an expert is governed not only by reward (or preference) but also by constraints. For instance, decisions on self-driving delivery vehicles are dependent not only on the route preferences/rewards (depending on past demand data) but also on the fuel in the vehicle and the time available. In such problems, imitation learning is challenging as decisions are not only dictated by the reward model but are also dependent on a cost-constrained model. In this paper, we provide multiple methods that match expert distributions in the presence of trajectory cost constraints through (a) Lagrangian-based method; (b) Meta-gradients to find a good trade-off between expected return and minimizing constraint violation; and (c) Cost-violation-based alternating gradient. We empirically show that leading imitation learning approaches imitate cost-constrained behaviors poorly and our meta-gradient-based approach achieves the best performance.

Crafting a Good Prompt or Providing Exemplary Dialogues? A Study of In-Context Learning for Persona-based Dialogue Generation

Previous in-context learning (ICL) research has focused on tasks such as classification, machine translation, text2table, etc., while studies on whether ICL can improve human-like dialogue generation are scarce. Our work fills this gap by systematically investigating the ICL capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in persona-based dialogue generation, conducting extensive experiments on high-quality real human Chinese dialogue datasets. From experimental results, we draw three conclusions: 1) adjusting prompt instructions is the most direct, effective, and economical way to improve generation quality; 2) randomly retrieving demonstrations (demos) achieves the best results, possibly due to the greater diversity and the amount of effective information; counter-intuitively, retrieving demos with a context identical to the query performs the worst; 3) even when we destroy the multi-turn associations and single-turn semantics in the demos, increasing the number of demos still improves dialogue performance, proving that LLMs can learn from corrupted dialogue demos. Previous explanations of the ICL mechanism, such as $n$-gram induction head, cannot fully account for this phenomenon.

Jointly Explicit and Implicit Cross-Modal Interaction Network for Anterior Chamber Inflammation Diagnosis

Uveitis demands the precise diagnosis of anterior chamber inflammation (ACI) for optimal treatment. However, current diagnostic methods only rely on a limited single-modal disease perspective, which leads to poor performance. In this paper, we investigate a promising yet challenging way to fuse multimodal data for ACI diagnosis. Notably, existing fusion paradigms focus on empowering implicit modality interactions (i.e., self-attention and its variants), but neglect to inject explicit modality interactions, especially from clinical knowledge and imaging property. To this end, we propose a jointly Explicit and implicit Cross-Modal Interaction Network (EiCI-Net) for Anterior Chamber Inflammation Diagnosis that uses anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT) images, slit-lamp images, and clinical data jointly. Specifically, we first develop CNN-Based Encoders and Tabular Processing Module (TPM) to extract efficient feature representations in different modalities. Then, we devise an Explicit Cross-Modal Interaction Module (ECIM) to generate attention maps as a kind of explicit clinical knowledge based on the tabular feature maps, then integrated them into the slit-lamp feature maps, allowing the CNN-Based Encoder to focus on more effective informativeness of the slit-lamp images. After that, the Implicit Cross-Modal Interaction Module (ICIM), a transformer-based network, further implicitly enhances modality interactions. Finally, we construct a considerable real-world dataset from our collaborative hospital and conduct sufficient experiments to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed EiCI-Net compared with the state-of-the-art classification methods in various metrics.

Preference-Aware Delivery Planning for Last-Mile Logistics

Optimizing delivery routes for last-mile logistics service is challenging and has attracted the attention of many researchers. These problems are usually modeled and solved as variants of vehicle routing problems (VRPs) with challenging real-world constraints (e.g., time windows, precedence). However, despite many decades of solid research on solving these VRP instances, we still see significant gaps between optimized routes and the routes that are actually preferred by the practitioners. Most of these gaps are due to the difference between what's being optimized, and what the practitioners actually care about, which is hard to be defined exactly in many instances. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical route optimizer with learnable parameters that combines the strength of both the optimization and machine learning approaches. Our hierarchical router first solves a zone-level Traveling Salesman Problem with learnable weights on various zone-level features; with the zone visit sequence fixed, we then solve the stop-level vehicle routing problem as a Shortest Hamiltonian Path problem. The Bayesian optimization approach is then introduced to allow us to adjust the weights to be assigned to different zone features used in solving the zone-level Traveling Salesman Problem. By using a real-world delivery dataset provided by the Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge, we demonstrate the importance of having both the optimization and the machine learning components. We also demonstrate how we can use route-related features to identify instances that we might have difficulty with. This paves ways to further research on how we can tackle these difficult instances.