RadPhi-3: Small Language Models for Radiology

LLM based copilot assistants are useful in everyday tasks. There is a proliferation in the exploration of AI assistant use cases to support radiology workflows in a reliable manner. In this work, we present RadPhi-3, a Small Language Model instruction tuned from Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct with 3.8B parameters to assist with various tasks in radiology workflows. While impression summary generation has been the primary task which has been explored in prior works w.r.t radiology reports of Chest X-rays, we also explore other useful tasks like change summary generation comparing the current radiology report and its prior report, section extraction from radiology reports, tagging the reports with various pathologies and tubes, lines or devices present in them etc. In-addition, instruction tuning RadPhi-3 involved learning from a credible knowledge source used by radiologists, Radiopaedia.org. RadPhi-3 can be used both to give reliable answers for radiology related queries as well as perform useful tasks related to radiology reports. RadPhi-3 achieves SOTA results on the RaLEs radiology report generation benchmark.

TorchSpatial: A Location Encoding Framework and Benchmark for Spatial Representation Learning

Spatial representation learning (SRL) aims at learning general-purpose neural network representations from various types of spatial data (e.g., points, polylines, polygons, networks, images, etc.) in their native formats. Learning good spatial representations is a fundamental problem for various downstream applications such as species distribution modeling, weather forecasting, trajectory generation, geographic question answering, etc. Even though SRL has become the foundation of almost all geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) research, we have not yet seen significant efforts to develop an extensive deep learning framework and benchmark to support SRL model development and evaluation. To fill this gap, we propose TorchSpatial, a learning framework and benchmark for location (point) encoding, which is one of the most fundamental data types of spatial representation learning. TorchSpatial contains three key components: 1) a unified location encoding framework that consolidates 15 commonly recognized location encoders, ensuring scalability and reproducibility of the implementations; 2) the LocBench benchmark tasks encompassing 7 geo-aware image classification and 4 geo-aware image regression datasets; 3) a comprehensive suite of evaluation metrics to quantify geo-aware models' overall performance as well as their geographic bias, with a novel Geo-Bias Score metric. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis and insights into the model performance and geographic bias of different location encoders. We believe TorchSpatial will foster future advancement of spatial representation learning and spatial fairness in GeoAI research. The TorchSpatial model framework, LocBench, and Geo-Bias Score evaluation framework are available at https://github.com/seai-lab/TorchSpatial.

Multimodal Needle in a Haystack: Benchmarking Long-Context Capability of Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant promise in various applications, leading to broad interest from researchers and practitioners alike. However, a comprehensive evaluation of their long-context capabilities remains underexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce the MultiModal Needle-in-a-haystack (MMNeedle) benchmark, specifically designed to assess the long-context capabilities of MLLMs. Besides multi-image input, we employ image stitching to further increase the input context length, and develop a protocol to automatically generate labels for sub-image level retrieval. Essentially, MMNeedle evaluates MLLMs by stress-testing their capability to locate a target sub-image (needle) within a set of images (haystack) based on textual instructions and descriptions of image contents. This setup necessitates an advanced understanding of extensive visual contexts and effective information retrieval within long-context image inputs. With this benchmark, we evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs, encompassing both API-based and open-source models. The findings reveal that GPT-4o consistently surpasses other models in long-context scenarios, but suffers from hallucination problems in negative samples, i.e., when needles are not in the haystacks. Our comprehensive long-context evaluation of MLLMs also sheds lights on the considerable performance gap between API-based and open-source models. All the code, data, and instructions required to reproduce the main results are available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/multimodal-needle-in-a-haystack.

MMCTAgent: Multi-modal Critical Thinking Agent Framework for Complex Visual Reasoning

Recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved their performance in tasks combining vision and language. However, challenges persist in detailed multi-modal understanding, comprehension of complex tasks, and reasoning over multi-modal information. This paper introduces MMCTAgent, a novel multi-modal critical thinking agent framework designed to address the inherent limitations of current MLLMs in complex visual reasoning tasks. Inspired by human cognitive processes and critical thinking, MMCTAgent iteratively analyzes multi-modal information, decomposes queries, plans strategies, and dynamically evolves its reasoning. Additionally, MMCTAgent incorporates critical thinking elements such as verification of final answers and self-reflection through a novel approach that defines a vision-based critic and identifies task-specific evaluation criteria, thereby enhancing its decision-making abilities. Through rigorous evaluations across various image and video understanding benchmarks, we demonstrate that MMCTAgent (with and without the critic) outperforms both foundational MLLMs and other tool-augmented pipelines.

Bridging the Gap: Dynamic Learning Strategies for Improving Multilingual Performance in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are at the forefront of transforming numerous domains globally. However, their inclusivity and effectiveness remain limited for non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages. This paper tackles the imperative challenge of enhancing the multilingual performance of LLMs without extensive training or fine-tuning. Through systematic investigation and evaluation of diverse languages using popular question-answering (QA) datasets, we present novel techniques that unlock the true potential of LLMs in a polyglot landscape. Our approach encompasses three key strategies that yield significant improvements in multilingual proficiency. First, by meticulously optimizing prompts tailored for polyglot LLMs, we unlock their latent capabilities, resulting in substantial performance boosts across languages. Second, we introduce a new hybrid approach that synergizes LLM Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with multilingual embeddings and achieves improved multilingual task performance. Finally, we introduce a novel learning approach that dynamically selects the optimal prompt strategy, LLM model, and embedding model per query at run-time. This dynamic adaptation maximizes the efficacy of LLMs across languages, outperforming best static and random strategies. Additionally, our approach adapts configurations in both offline and online settings, and can seamlessly adapt to new languages and datasets, leading to substantial advancements in multilingual understanding and generation across diverse languages.

PromptWizard: Task-Aware Agent-driven Prompt Optimization Framework

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI across diverse domains, showcasing remarkable capabilities. Central to their success is the concept of prompting, which guides model output generation. However, manual prompt engineering is labor-intensive and domain-specific, necessitating automated solutions. This paper introduces PromptWizard, a novel framework leveraging LLMs to iteratively synthesize and refine prompts tailored to specific tasks. Unlike existing approaches, PromptWizard optimizes both prompt instructions and in-context examples, maximizing model performance. The framework iteratively refines prompts by mutating instructions and incorporating negative examples to deepen understanding and ensure diversity. It further enhances both instructions and examples with the aid of a critic, synthesizing new instructions and examples enriched with detailed reasoning steps for optimal performance. PromptWizard offers several key features and capabilities, including computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art approaches, adaptability to scenarios with varying amounts of training data, and effectiveness with smaller LLMs. Rigorous evaluation across 35 tasks on 8 datasets demonstrates PromptWizard's superiority over existing prompt strategies, showcasing its efficacy and scalability in prompt optimization.

RAD-PHI2: Instruction Tuning PHI-2 for Radiology

Small Language Models (SLMs) have shown remarkable performance in general domain language understanding, reasoning and coding tasks, but their capabilities in the medical domain, particularly concerning radiology text, is less explored. In this study, we investigate the application of SLMs for general radiology knowledge specifically question answering related to understanding of symptoms, radiological appearances of findings, differential diagnosis, assessing prognosis, and suggesting treatments w.r.t diseases pertaining to different organ systems. Additionally, we explore the utility of SLMs in handling text-related tasks with respect to radiology reports within AI-driven radiology workflows. We fine-tune Phi-2, a SLM with 2.7 billion parameters using high-quality educational content from Radiopaedia, a collaborative online radiology resource. The resulting language model, RadPhi-2-Base, exhibits the ability to address general radiology queries across various systems (e.g., chest, cardiac). Furthermore, we investigate Phi-2 for instruction tuning, enabling it to perform specific tasks. By fine-tuning Phi-2 on both general domain tasks and radiology-specific tasks related to chest X-ray reports, we create Rad-Phi2. Our empirical results reveal that Rad-Phi2 Base and Rad-Phi2 perform comparably or even outperform larger models such as Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 and GPT-4 providing concise and precise answers. In summary, our work demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of utilizing SLMs in radiology workflows both for knowledge related queries as well as for performing specific tasks related to radiology reports thereby opening up new avenues for enhancing the quality and efficiency of radiology practice.

Evaluating LLMs' Mathematical Reasoning in Financial Document Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs), excel in natural language understanding, but their capability for complex mathematical reasoning with an amalgamation of structured tables and unstructured text is uncertain. This study explores LLMs' mathematical reasoning on four financial tabular question-answering datasets: TATQA, FinQA, ConvFinQA, and Multihiertt. Through extensive experiments with various models and prompting techniques, we assess how LLMs adapt to complex tables and mathematical tasks. We focus on sensitivity to table complexity and performance variations with an increasing number of arithmetic reasoning steps. The results provide insights into LLMs' capabilities and limitations in handling complex mathematical scenarios for semi-structured tables. Ultimately, we introduce a novel prompting technique tailored to semi-structured documents, matching or outperforming other baselines in performance while providing a nuanced understanding of LLMs abilities for such a task.

Breaking Language Barriers with a LEAP: Learning Strategies for Polyglot LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are at the forefront of transforming numerous domains globally. However, their inclusivity and effectiveness remain limited for non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages. This paper tackles the imperative challenge of enhancing the multilingual performance of LLMs, specifically focusing on Generative models. Through systematic investigation and evaluation of diverse languages using popular question-answering (QA) datasets, we present novel techniques that unlock the true potential of LLMs in a polyglot landscape. Our approach encompasses three key strategies that yield remarkable improvements in multilingual proficiency. First, by meticulously optimizing prompts tailored for polyglot LLMs, we unlock their latent capabilities, resulting in substantial performance boosts across languages. Second, we introduce a new hybrid approach that synergizes GPT generation with multilingual embeddings and achieves significant multilingual performance improvement on critical tasks like QA and retrieval. Finally, to further propel the performance of polyglot LLMs, we introduce a novel learning algorithm that dynamically selects the optimal prompt strategy, LLM model, and embeddings per query. This dynamic adaptation maximizes the efficacy of LLMs across languages, outperforming best static and random strategies. Our results show substantial advancements in multilingual understanding and generation across a diverse range of languages.

Retrieval Augmented Chest X-Ray Report Generation using OpenAI GPT models

We propose Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as an approach for automated radiology report writing that leverages multimodally aligned embeddings from a contrastively pretrained vision language model for retrieval of relevant candidate radiology text for an input radiology image and a general domain generative model like OpenAI text-davinci-003, gpt-3.5-turbo and gpt-4 for report generation using the relevant radiology text retrieved. This approach keeps hallucinated generations under check and provides capabilities to generate report content in the format we desire leveraging the instruction following capabilities of these generative models. Our approach achieves better clinical metrics with a BERTScore of 0.2865 ({\Delta}+ 25.88%) and Semb score of 0.4026 ({\Delta}+ 6.31%). Our approach can be broadly relevant for different clinical settings as it allows to augment the automated radiology report generation process with content relevant for that setting while also having the ability to inject user intents and requirements in the prompts as part of the report generation process to modulate the content and format of the generated reports as applicable for that clinical setting.