Zodiac: A Cardiologist-Level LLM Framework for Multi-Agent Diagnostics

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in healthcare. However, a significant gap remains regarding LLMs' professionalism in domain-specific clinical practices, limiting their application in real-world diagnostics. In this work, we introduce ZODIAC, an LLM-powered framework with cardiologist-level professionalism designed to engage LLMs in cardiological diagnostics. ZODIAC assists cardiologists by extracting clinically relevant characteristics from patient data, detecting significant arrhythmias, and generating preliminary reports for the review and refinement by cardiologists. To achieve cardiologist-level professionalism, ZODIAC is built on a multi-agent collaboration framework, enabling the processing of patient data across multiple modalities. Each LLM agent is fine-tuned using real-world patient data adjudicated by cardiologists, reinforcing the model's professionalism. ZODIAC undergoes rigorous clinical validation with independent cardiologists, evaluated across eight metrics that measure clinical effectiveness and address security concerns. Results show that ZODIAC outperforms industry-leading models, including OpenAI's GPT-4o, Meta's Llama-3.1-405B, and Google's Gemini-pro, as well as medical-specialist LLMs like Microsoft's BioGPT. ZODIAC demonstrates the transformative potential of specialized LLMs in healthcare by delivering domain-specific solutions that meet the stringent demands of medical practice. Notably, ZODIAC has been successfully integrated into electrocardiography (ECG) devices, exemplifying the growing trend of embedding LLMs into Software-as-Medical-Device (SaMD).

Dual-Layer Training and Decoding of Large Language Model with Simultaneously Thinking and Speaking

Large Language Model can reasonably understand and generate human expressions but may lack of thorough thinking and reasoning mechanisms. Recently there have been several studies which enhance the thinking ability of language models but most of them are not data-driven or training-based. In this paper, we are motivated by the cognitive mechanism in the natural world, and design a novel model architecture called TaS which allows it to first consider the thoughts and then express the response based upon the query. We design several pipelines to annotate or generate the thought contents from prompt-response samples, then add language heads in a middle layer which behaves as the thinking layer. We train the language model by the thoughts-augmented data and successfully let the thinking layer automatically generate reasonable thoughts and finally output more reasonable responses. Both qualitative examples and quantitative results validate the effectiveness and performance of TaS. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TadE.

M2R-Whisper: Multi-stage and Multi-scale Retrieval Augmentation for Enhancing Whisper

State-of-the-art models like OpenAI's Whisper exhibit strong performance in multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR), but they still face challenges in accurately recognizing diverse subdialects. In this paper, we propose M2R-whisper, a novel multi-stage and multi-scale retrieval augmentation approach designed to enhance ASR performance in low-resource settings. Building on the principles of in-context learning (ICL) and retrieval-augmented techniques, our method employs sentence-level ICL in the pre-processing stage to harness contextual information, while integrating token-level k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) retrieval as a post-processing step to further refine the final output distribution. By synergistically combining sentence-level and token-level retrieval strategies, M2R-whisper effectively mitigates various types of recognition errors. Experiments conducted on Mandarin and subdialect datasets, including AISHELL-1 and KeSpeech, demonstrate substantial improvements in ASR accuracy, all achieved without any parameter updates.

InstructSing: High-Fidelity Singing Voice Generation via Instructing Yourself

It is challenging to accelerate the training process while ensuring both high-quality generated voices and acceptable inference speed. In this paper, we propose a novel neural vocoder called InstructSing, which can converge much faster compared with other neural vocoders while maintaining good performance by integrating differentiable digital signal processing and adversarial training. It includes one generator and two discriminators. Specifically, the generator incorporates a harmonic-plus-noise (HN) module to produce 8kHz audio as an instructive signal. Subsequently, the HN module is connected with an extended WaveNet by an UNet-based module, which transforms the output of the HN module to a latent variable sequence containing essential periodic and aperiodic information. In addition to the latent sequence, the extended WaveNet also takes the mel-spectrogram as input to generate 48kHz high-fidelity singing voices. In terms of discriminators, we combine a multi-period discriminator, as originally proposed in HiFiGAN, with a multi-resolution multi-band STFT discriminator. Notably, InstructSing achieves comparable voice quality to other neural vocoders but with only one-tenth of the training steps on a 4 NVIDIA V100 GPU machine\footnote{{Demo page: \href{https://wavelandspeech.github.io/instructsing/}{\texttt{https://wavelandspeech.github.io/inst\\ructsing/}}}}. We plan to open-source our code and pretrained model once the paper get accepted.

Alleviating Hallucinations in Large Language Models with Scepticism Modeling

Hallucinations is a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), prevents adoption in diverse fields. Uncertainty estimation could be used for alleviating the damages of hallucinations. The skeptical emotion of human could be useful for enhancing the ability of self estimation. Inspirited by this observation, we proposed a new approach called Skepticism Modeling (SM). This approach is formalized by combining the information of token and logits for self estimation. We construct the doubt emotion aware data, perform continual pre-training, and then fine-tune the LLMs, improve their ability of self estimation. Experimental results demonstrate this new approach effectively enhances a model's ability to estimate their uncertainty, and validate its generalization ability of other tasks by out-of-domain experiments.

A Practice of Post-Training on Llama-3 70B with Optimal Selection of Additional Language Mixture Ratio

Large Language Models (LLM) often needs to be Continual Pre-Trained (CPT) to obtain the unfamiliar language skill or adapt into new domains. The huge training cost of CPT often asks for cautious choice of key hyper-parameters such as the mixture ratio of extra language or domain corpus. However, there is no systematic study which bridge the gap between the optimal mixture ratio and the actual model performance, and the gap between experimental scaling law and the actual deployment in the full model size. In this paper, we perform CPT on Llama-3 8B and 70B to enhance its Chinese ability. We study the optimal correlation between the Additional Language Mixture Ratio (ALMR) and the Learning Rate (LR) on the 8B size which directly indicate the optimal experimental set up. By thorough choice of hyper-parameter, and subsequent fine-tuning, the model capability is improved not only on the Chinese-related benchmark, but also some specific domains including math, coding and emotional intelligence. We deploy the final 70B version of LLM on an real-life chat system which obtain satisfying performance.

Alt-MoE: Multimodal Alignment via Alternating Optimization of Multi-directional MoE with Unimodal Models

Recent Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMs) have made significant advancements in multi-modal alignment by employing lightweight connection modules to facilitate the representation and fusion of knowledge from existing pre-trained uni-modal models. However, these methods still rely on modality-specific and direction-specific connectors, leading to compartmentalized knowledge representations and reduced computational efficiency, which limits the model's ability to form unified multi-modal representations. To address these issues, we introduce a novel training framework, Alt-MoE, which employs the Mixture of Experts (MoE) as a unified multi-directional connector across modalities, and employs a multi-step sequential alternating unidirectional alignment strategy, which converges to bidirectional alignment over iterations. The extensive empirical studies revealed the following key points: 1) Alt-MoE achieves competitive results by integrating diverse knowledge representations from uni-modal models. This approach seamlessly fuses the specialized expertise of existing high-performance uni-modal models, effectively synthesizing their domain-specific knowledge into a cohesive multi-modal representation. 2) Alt-MoE efficiently scales to new tasks and modalities without altering its model architecture or training strategy. Furthermore, Alt-MoE operates in latent space, supporting vector pre-storage and real-time retrieval via lightweight multi-directional MoE, thereby facilitating massive data processing. Our methodology has been validated on several well-performing uni-modal models (LLAMA3, Qwen2, and DINOv2), achieving competitive results on a wide range of downstream tasks and datasets.

Enhancing Emotion Recognition in Incomplete Data: A Novel Cross-Modal Alignment, Reconstruction, and Refinement Framework

Multimodal emotion recognition systems rely heavily on the full availability of modalities, suffering significant performance declines when modal data is incomplete. To tackle this issue, we present the Cross-Modal Alignment, Reconstruction, and Refinement (CM-ARR) framework, an innovative approach that sequentially engages in cross-modal alignment, reconstruction, and refinement phases to handle missing modalities and enhance emotion recognition. This framework utilizes unsupervised distribution-based contrastive learning to align heterogeneous modal distributions, reducing discrepancies and modeling semantic uncertainty effectively. The reconstruction phase applies normalizing flow models to transform these aligned distributions and recover missing modalities. The refinement phase employs supervised point-based contrastive learning to disrupt semantic correlations and accentuate emotional traits, thereby enriching the affective content of the reconstructed representations. Extensive experiments on the IEMOCAP and MSP-IMPROV datasets confirm the superior performance of CM-ARR under conditions of both missing and complete modalities. Notably, averaged across six scenarios of missing modalities, CM-ARR achieves absolute improvements of 2.11% in WAR and 2.12% in UAR on the IEMOCAP dataset, and 1.71% and 1.96% in WAR and UAR, respectively, on the MSP-IMPROV dataset.

MAP: Low-compute Model Merging with Amortized Pareto Fronts via Quadratic Approximation

Model merging has emerged as an effective approach to combine multiple single-task models, fine-tuned from the same pre-trained model, into a multitask model. This process typically involves computing a weighted average of the model parameters without any additional training. Existing model-merging methods focus on enhancing average task accuracy. However, interference and conflicts between the objectives of different tasks can lead to trade-offs during model merging. In real-world applications, a set of solutions with various trade-offs can be more informative, helping practitioners make decisions based on diverse preferences. In this paper, we introduce a novel low-compute algorithm, Model Merging with Amortized Pareto Front (MAP). MAP identifies a Pareto set of scaling coefficients for merging multiple models to reflect the trade-offs. The core component of MAP is approximating the evaluation metrics of the various tasks using a quadratic approximation surrogate model derived from a pre-selected set of scaling coefficients, enabling amortized inference. Experimental results on vision and natural language processing tasks show that MAP can accurately identify the Pareto front. To further reduce the required computation of MAP, we propose (1) a Bayesian adaptive sampling algorithm and (2) a nested merging scheme with multiple stages.

From Basic to Extra Features: Hypergraph Transformer Pretrain-then-Finetuning for Balanced Clinical Predictions on EHR

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain rich patient information and are crucial for clinical research and practice. In recent years, deep learning models have been applied to EHRs, but they often rely on massive features, which may not be readily available for all patients. We propose HTP-Star, which leverages hypergraph structures with a pretrain-then-finetune framework for modeling EHR data, enabling seamless integration of additional features. Additionally, we design two techniques, namely (1) Smoothness-inducing Regularization and (2) Group-balanced Reweighting, to enhance the model's robustness during fine-tuning. Through experiments conducted on two real EHR datasets, we demonstrate that HTP-Star consistently outperforms various baselines while striking a balance between patients with basic and extra features.