Deep Representation Learning for Multi-functional Degradation Modeling of Community-dwelling Aging Population

As the aging population grows, particularly for the baby boomer generation, the United States is witnessing a significant increase in the elderly population experiencing multifunctional disabilities. These disabilities, stemming from a variety of chronic diseases, injuries, and impairments, present a complex challenge due to their multidimensional nature, encompassing both physical and cognitive aspects. Traditional methods often use univariate regression-based methods to model and predict single degradation conditions and assume population homogeneity, which is inadequate to address the complexity and diversity of aging-related degradation. This study introduces a novel framework for multi-functional degradation modeling that captures the multidimensional (e.g., physical and cognitive) and heterogeneous nature of elderly disabilities. Utilizing deep learning, our approach predicts health degradation scores and uncovers latent heterogeneity from elderly health histories, offering both efficient estimation and explainable insights into the diverse effects and causes of aging-related degradation. A real-case study demonstrates the effectiveness and marks a pivotal contribution to accurately modeling the intricate dynamics of elderly degradation, and addresses the healthcare challenges in the aging population.

Detect2Interact: Localizing Object Key Field in Visual Question Answering (VQA) with LLMs

Localization plays a crucial role in enhancing the practicality and precision of VQA systems. By enabling fine-grained identification and interaction with specific parts of an object, it significantly improves the system's ability to provide contextually relevant and spatially accurate responses, crucial for applications in dynamic environments like robotics and augmented reality. However, traditional systems face challenges in accurately mapping objects within images to generate nuanced and spatially aware responses. In this work, we introduce "Detect2Interact", which addresses these challenges by introducing an advanced approach for fine-grained object visual key field detection. First, we use the segment anything model (SAM) to generate detailed spatial maps of objects in images. Next, we use Vision Studio to extract semantic object descriptions. Third, we employ GPT-4's common sense knowledge, bridging the gap between an object's semantics and its spatial map. As a result, Detect2Interact achieves consistent qualitative results on object key field detection across extensive test cases and outperforms the existing VQA system with object detection by providing a more reasonable and finer visual representation.

Label-free timing analysis of modularized nuclear detectors with physics-constrained deep learning

Pulse timing is an important topic in nuclear instrumentation, with far-reaching applications from high energy physics to radiation imaging. While high-speed analog-to-digital converters become more and more developed and accessible, their potential uses and merits in nuclear detector signal processing are still uncertain, partially due to associated timing algorithms which are not fully understood and utilized. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on deep learning for timing analysis of modularized nuclear detectors without explicit needs of labelling event data. By taking advantage of the inner time correlation of individual detectors, a label-free loss function with a specially designed regularizer is formed to supervise the training of neural networks towards a meaningful and accurate mapping function. We mathematically demonstrate the existence of the optimal function desired by the method, and give a systematic algorithm for training and calibration of the model. The proposed method is validated on two experimental datasets. In the toy experiment, the neural network model achieves the single-channel time resolution of 8.8 ps and exhibits robustness against concept drift in the dataset. In the electromagnetic calorimeter experiment, several neural network models (FC, CNN and LSTM) are tested to show their conformance to the underlying physical constraint and to judge their performance against traditional methods. In total, the proposed method works well in either ideal or noisy experimental condition and recovers the time information from waveform samples successfully and precisely.