Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of text-generation tasks. However, LLMs still struggle with problems requiring multi-step decision-making and environmental feedback, such as online shopping, scientific reasoning, and mathematical problem-solving. Unlike pure text data, collecting large-scale decision-making data is challenging. Moreover, many powerful LLMs are only accessible through APIs, which hinders their fine-tuning for agent tasks due to cost and complexity. To address LLM agents' limitations, we propose a framework that can automatically learn a reward model from the environment without human annotations. This model can be used to evaluate the action trajectories of LLM agents and provide heuristics for task planning. Specifically, our approach involves employing one LLM-based agent to navigate an environment randomly, generating diverse action trajectories. Subsequently, a separate LLM is leveraged to assign a task intent and synthesize a negative response alongside the correct response for each trajectory. These triplets (task intent, positive response, and negative response) are then utilized as training data to optimize a reward model capable of scoring action trajectories. The effectiveness and generalizability of our framework are demonstrated through evaluations conducted on different agent benchmarks. In conclusion, our proposed framework represents a significant advancement in enhancing LLM agents' decision-making capabilities. By automating the learning of reward models, we overcome the challenges of data scarcity and API limitations, potentially revolutionizing the application of LLMs in complex and interactive environments. This research paves the way for more sophisticated AI agents capable of tackling a wide range of real-world problems requiring multi-step decision-making.
Abstract:Although retrieval-augmented generation(RAG) significantly improves generation quality by retrieving external knowledge bases and integrating generated content, it faces computational efficiency bottlenecks, particularly in knowledge retrieval tasks involving hierarchical structures for Tree-RAG. This paper proposes a Tree-RAG acceleration method based on the improved Cuckoo Filter, which optimizes entity localization during the retrieval process to achieve significant performance improvements. Tree-RAG effectively organizes entities through the introduction of a hierarchical tree structure, while the Cuckoo Filter serves as an efficient data structure that supports rapid membership queries and dynamic updates. The experiment results demonstrate that our method is much faster than naive Tree-RAG while maintaining high levels of generative quality. When the number of trees is large, our method is hundreds of times faster than naive Tree-RAG. Our work is available at https://github.com/TUPYP7180/CFT-RAG-2025.
Abstract:Coded apertures, traditionally employed in x-ray astronomy for imaging celestial objects, are now being adapted for micro-scale applications, particularly in studying microscopic specimens with synchrotron light diffraction. In this paper, we focus on micro-coded aperture imaging and its capacity to accomplish depth-resolved micro-diffraction analysis within crystalline specimens. We study aperture specifications and scanning parameters by assessing characteristics like size, thickness, and patterns. Numerical experiments assist in assessing their impact on reconstruction quality. Empirical data from a Laue diffraction microscope at a synchrotron undulator beamline supports our findings. Overall, our results offer key insights for optimizing aperture design in advancing micro-scale diffraction imaging at synchrotrons. This study contributes insights to this expanding field and suggests significant advancements, especially when coupled with the enhanced flux anticipated from the global upgrades of synchrotron sources.
Abstract:The global diabetes epidemic highlights the importance of maintaining good glycemic control. Glucose prediction is a fundamental aspect of diabetes management, facilitating real-time decision-making. Recent research has introduced models focusing on long-term glucose trend prediction, which are unsuitable for real-time decision-making and result in delayed responses. Conversely, models designed to respond to immediate glucose level changes cannot analyze glucose variability comprehensively. Moreover, contemporary research generally integrates various physiological parameters (e.g. insulin doses, food intake, etc.), which inevitably raises data privacy concerns. To bridge such a research gap, we propose TimeGlu -- an end-to-end pipeline for short-term glucose prediction solely based on CGM time series data. We implement four baseline methods to conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis of the model's performance. Through extensive experiments on two contrasting datasets (CGM Glucose and Colas dataset), TimeGlu achieves state-of-the-art performance without the need for additional personal data from patients, providing effective guidance for real-world diabetic glucose management.
Abstract:Traditional analysis of highly distorted micro-X-ray diffraction ({\mu}-XRD) patterns from hydrothermal fluid environments is a time-consuming process, often requiring substantial data preprocessing and labeled experimental data. This study demonstrates the potential of deep learning with a multitask learning (MTL) architecture to overcome these limitations. We trained MTL models to identify phase information in {\mu}-XRD patterns, minimizing the need for labeled experimental data and masking preprocessing steps. Notably, MTL models showed superior accuracy compared to binary classification CNNs. Additionally, introducing a tailored cross-entropy loss function improved MTL model performance. Most significantly, MTL models tuned to analyze raw and unmasked XRD patterns achieved close performance to models analyzing preprocessed data, with minimal accuracy differences. This work indicates that advanced deep learning architectures like MTL can automate arduous data handling tasks, streamline the analysis of distorted XRD patterns, and reduce the reliance on labor-intensive experimental datasets.
Abstract:Speech anonymization and de-identification have garnered significant attention recently, especially in the healthcare area including telehealth consultations, patient voiceprint matching, and patient real-time monitoring. Speaker identity classification tasks, which involve recognizing specific speakers from audio to learn identity features, are crucial for de-identification. Since rare studies have effectively combined speech anonymization with identity classification, we propose SAIC - an innovative pipeline for integrating Speech Anonymization and Identity Classification. SAIC demonstrates remarkable performance and reaches state-of-the-art in the speaker identity classification task on the Voxceleb1 dataset, with a top-1 accuracy of 96.1%. Although SAIC is not trained or evaluated specifically on clinical data, the result strongly proves the model's effectiveness and the possibility to generalize into the healthcare area, providing insightful guidance for future work.
Abstract:Recent works have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) could empower traditional neuro-symbolic models via programming capabilities to translate language into module descriptions, thus achieving strong visual reasoning results while maintaining the model's transparency and efficiency. However, these models usually exhaustively generate the entire code snippet given each new instance of a task, which is extremely ineffective. We propose generative neuro-symbolic visual reasoning by growing and reusing modules. Specifically, our model consists of three unique stages, module initialization, module generation, and module execution. First, given a vision-language task, we adopt LLMs to examine whether we could reuse and grow over established modules to handle this new task. If not, we initialize a new module needed by the task and specify the inputs and outputs of this new module. After that, the new module is created by querying LLMs to generate corresponding code snippets that match the requirements. In order to get a better sense of the new module's ability, we treat few-shot training examples as test cases to see if our new module could pass these cases. If yes, the new module is added to the module library for future reuse. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our model on the testing set by executing the parsed programs with the newly made visual modules to get the results. We find the proposed model possesses several advantages. First, it performs competitively on standard tasks like visual question answering and referring expression comprehension; Second, the modules learned from one task can be seamlessly transferred to new tasks; Last but not least, it is able to adapt to new visual reasoning tasks by observing a few training examples and reusing modules.
Abstract:Manual analysis of XRD data is usually laborious and time consuming. The deep neural network (DNN) based models trained by synthetic XRD patterns are proved to be an automatic, accurate, and high throughput method to analysis common XRD data collected from solid sample in ambient environment. However, it remains unknown that whether synthetic XRD based models are capable to solve u-XRD mapping data for in-situ experiments involving liquid phase exhibiting lower quality with significant artifacts. In this study, we collected u-XRD mapping data from an LaCl3-calcite hydrothermal fluid system and trained two categories of models to solve the experimental XRD patterns. The models trained by synthetic XRD patterns show low accuracy (as low as 64%) when solving experimental u-XRD mapping data. The accuracy of the DNN models was significantly improved (90% or above) when training them with the dataset containing both synthetic and small number of labeled experimental u-XRD patterns. This study highlighted the importance of labeled experimental patterns on the training of DNN models to solve u-XRD mapping data from in-situ experiments involving liquid phase.
Abstract:We introduce a rapid data acquisition and reconstruction method to image the crystalline structure of materials and associated strain and orientations at micrometer resolution using Laue diffraction. Our method relies on scanning a coded-aperture across the diffracted x-ray beams from a broadband illumination, and a reconstruction algorithm to resolve Laue microdiffraction patterns as a function of depth along the incident illumination path. This method provides a rapid access to full diffraction information at sub-micrometer volume elements in bulk materials. Here we present the theory as well as the experimental validation of this imaging approach.
Abstract:To achieve an accurate assessment of root canal therapy, a fundamental step is to perform tooth root segmentation on oral X-ray images, in that the position of tooth root boundary is significant anatomy information in root canal therapy evaluation. However, the fuzzy boundary makes the tooth root segmentation very challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end U-Net like Group Transformer Network (GT U-Net) for the tooth root segmentation. The proposed network retains the essential structure of U-Net but each of the encoders and decoders is replaced by a group Transformer, which significantly reduces the computational cost of traditional Transformer architectures by using the grouping structure and the bottleneck structure. In addition, the proposed GT U-Net is composed of a hybrid structure of convolution and Transformer, which makes it independent of pre-training weights. For optimization, we also propose a shape-sensitive Fourier Descriptor (FD) loss function to make use of shape prior knowledge. Experimental results show that our proposed network achieves the state-of-the-art performance on our collected tooth root segmentation dataset and the public retina dataset DRIVE. Code has been released at https://github.com/Kent0n-Li/GT-U-Net.