FAMMA: A Benchmark for Financial Domain Multilingual Multimodal Question Answering

In this paper, we introduce FAMMA, an open-source benchmark for financial multilingual multimodal question answering (QA). Our benchmark aims to evaluate the abilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in answering questions that require advanced financial knowledge and sophisticated reasoning. It includes 1,758 meticulously collected question-answer pairs from university textbooks and exams, spanning 8 major subfields in finance including corporate finance, asset management, and financial engineering. Some of the QA pairs are written in Chinese or French, while a majority of them are in English. These questions are presented in a mixed format combining text and heterogeneous image types, such as charts, tables, and diagrams. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art MLLMs on our benchmark, and our analysis shows that FAMMA poses a significant challenge for these models. Even advanced systems like GPT-4o and Claude-35-Sonnet achieve only 42\% accuracy. Additionally, the open-source Qwen2-VL lags notably behind its proprietary counterparts. Lastly, we explore GPT o1-style reasoning chains to enhance the models' reasoning capabilities, which significantly improve error correction. Our FAMMA benchmark will facilitate future research to develop expert systems in financial QA. The leaderboard is available at https://famma-bench.github.io/famma/ .

Predicting Rental Price of Lane Houses in Shanghai with Machine Learning Methods and Large Language Models

Housing has emerged as a crucial concern among young individuals residing in major cities, including Shanghai. Given the unprecedented surge in property prices in this metropolis, young people have increasingly resorted to the rental market to address their housing needs. This study utilizes five traditional machine learning methods: multiple linear regression (MLR), ridge regression (RR), lasso regression (LR), decision tree (DT), and random forest (RF), along with a Large Language Model (LLM) approach using ChatGPT, for predicting the rental prices of lane houses in Shanghai. It applies these methods to examine a public data sample of about 2,609 lane house rental transactions in 2021 in Shanghai, and then compares the results of these methods. In terms of predictive power, RF has achieved the best performance among the traditional methods. However, the LLM approach, particularly in the 10-shot scenario, shows promising results that surpass traditional methods in terms of R-Squared value. The three performance metrics: mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and R-Squared, are used to evaluate the models. Our conclusion is that while traditional machine learning models offer robust techniques for rental price prediction, the integration of LLM such as ChatGPT holds significant potential for enhancing predictive accuracy.

PoCo: A Self-Supervised Approach via Polar Transformation Based Progressive Contrastive Learning for Ophthalmic Disease Diagnosis

Automatic ophthalmic disease diagnosis on fundus images is important in clinical practice. However, due to complex fundus textures and limited annotated data, developing an effective automatic method for this problem is still challenging. In this paper, we present a self-supervised method via polar transformation based progressive contrastive learning, called PoCo, for ophthalmic disease diagnosis. Specifically, we novelly inject the polar transformation into contrastive learning to 1) promote contrastive learning pre-training to be faster and more stable and 2) naturally capture task-free and rotation-related textures, which provides insights into disease recognition on fundus images. Beneficially, simple normal translation-invariant convolution on transformed images can equivalently replace the complex rotation-invariant and sector convolution on raw images. After that, we develop a progressive contrastive learning method to efficiently utilize large unannotated images and a novel progressive hard negative sampling scheme to gradually reduce the negative sample number for efficient training and performance enhancement. Extensive experiments on three public ophthalmic disease datasets show that our PoCo achieves state-of-the-art performance with good generalization ability, validating that our method can reduce annotation efforts and provide reliable diagnosis. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/wjh892521292/PoCo}.

Ord2Seq: Regarding Ordinal Regression as Label Sequence Prediction

Ordinal regression refers to classifying object instances into ordinal categories. It has been widely studied in many scenarios, such as medical disease grading, movie rating, etc. Known methods focused only on learning inter-class ordinal relationships, but still incur limitations in distinguishing adjacent categories thus far. In this paper, we propose a simple sequence prediction framework for ordinal regression called Ord2Seq, which, for the first time, transforms each ordinal category label into a special label sequence and thus regards an ordinal regression task as a sequence prediction process. In this way, we decompose an ordinal regression task into a series of recursive binary classification steps, so as to subtly distinguish adjacent categories. Comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness of distinguishing adjacent categories for performance improvement and our new approach exceeds state-of-the-art performances in four different scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/wjh892521292/Ord2Seq.

CTT-Net: A Multi-view Cross-token Transformer for Cataract Postoperative Visual Acuity Prediction

Surgery is the only viable treatment for cataract patients with visual acuity (VA) impairment. Clinically, to assess the necessity of cataract surgery, accurately predicting postoperative VA before surgery by analyzing multi-view optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is crucially needed. Unfortunately, due to complicated fundus conditions, determining postoperative VA remains difficult for medical experts. Deep learning methods for this problem were developed in recent years. Although effective, these methods still face several issues, such as not efficiently exploring potential relations between multi-view OCT images, neglecting the key role of clinical prior knowledge (e.g., preoperative VA value), and using only regression-based metrics which are lacking reference. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-token Transformer Network (CTT-Net) for postoperative VA prediction by analyzing both the multi-view OCT images and preoperative VA. To effectively fuse multi-view features of OCT images, we develop cross-token attention that could restrict redundant/unnecessary attention flow. Further, we utilize the preoperative VA value to provide more information for postoperative VA prediction and facilitate fusion between views. Moreover, we design an auxiliary classification loss to improve model performance and assess VA recovery more sufficiently, avoiding the limitation by only using the regression metrics. To evaluate CTT-Net, we build a multi-view OCT image dataset collected from our collaborative hospital. A set of extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our model compared to existing methods in various metrics. Code is available at: https://github.com/wjh892521292/Cataract OCT.

Localized Adversarial Training for Increased Accuracy and Robustness in Image Classification

Today's state-of-the-art image classifiers fail to correctly classify carefully manipulated adversarial images. In this work, we develop a new, localized adversarial attack that generates adversarial examples by imperceptibly altering the backgrounds of normal images. We first use this attack to highlight the unnecessary sensitivity of neural networks to changes in the background of an image, then use it as part of a new training technique: localized adversarial training. By including locally adversarial images in the training set, we are able to create a classifier that suffers less loss than a non-adversarially trained counterpart model on both natural and adversarial inputs. The evaluation of our localized adversarial training algorithm on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets shows decreased accuracy loss on natural images, and increased robustness against adversarial inputs.