Baichuan-M1: Pushing the Medical Capability of Large Language Models

The current generation of large language models (LLMs) is typically designed for broad, general-purpose applications, while domain-specific LLMs, especially in vertical fields like medicine, remain relatively scarce. In particular, the development of highly efficient and practical LLMs for the medical domain is challenging due to the complexity of medical knowledge and the limited availability of high-quality data. To bridge this gap, we introduce Baichuan-M1, a series of large language models specifically optimized for medical applications. Unlike traditional approaches that simply continue pretraining on existing models or apply post-training to a general base model, Baichuan-M1 is trained from scratch with a dedicated focus on enhancing medical capabilities. Our model is trained on 20 trillion tokens and incorporates a range of effective training methods that strike a balance between general capabilities and medical expertise. As a result, Baichuan-M1 not only performs strongly across general domains such as mathematics and coding but also excels in specialized medical fields. We have open-sourced Baichuan-M1-14B, a mini version of our model, which can be accessed through the following links.

SleepNetZero: Zero-Burden Zero-Shot Reliable Sleep Staging With Neural Networks Based on Ballistocardiograms

Sleep monitoring plays a crucial role in maintaining good health, with sleep staging serving as an essential metric in the monitoring process. Traditional methods, utilizing medical sensors like EEG and ECG, can be effective but often present challenges such as unnatural user experience, complex deployment, and high costs. Ballistocardiography~(BCG), a type of piezoelectric sensor signal, offers a non-invasive, user-friendly, and easily deployable alternative for long-term home monitoring. However, reliable BCG-based sleep staging is challenging due to the limited sleep monitoring data available for BCG. A restricted training dataset prevents the model from generalization across populations. Additionally, transferring to BCG faces difficulty ensuring model robustness when migrating from other data sources. To address these issues, we introduce SleepNetZero, a zero-shot learning based approach for sleep staging. To tackle the generalization challenge, we propose a series of BCG feature extraction methods that align BCG components with corresponding respiratory, cardiac, and movement channels in PSG. This allows models to be trained on large-scale PSG datasets that are diverse in population. For the migration challenge, we employ data augmentation techniques, significantly enhancing generalizability. We conducted extensive training and testing on large datasets~(12393 records from 9637 different subjects), achieving an accuracy of 0.803 and a Cohen's Kappa of 0.718. ZeroSleepNet was also deployed in real prototype~(monitoring pads) and tested in actual hospital settings~(265 users), demonstrating an accuracy of 0.697 and a Cohen's Kappa of 0.589. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first known reliable BCG-based sleep staging effort and marks a significant step towards in-home health monitoring.

Domain-invariant Representation Learning via Segment Anything Model for Blood Cell Classification

Accurate classification of blood cells is of vital significance in the diagnosis of hematological disorders. However, in real-world scenarios, domain shifts caused by the variability in laboratory procedures and settings, result in a rapid deterioration of the model's generalization performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework of domain-invariant representation learning (DoRL) via segment anything model (SAM) for blood cell classification. The DoRL comprises two main components: a LoRA-based SAM (LoRA-SAM) and a cross-domain autoencoder (CAE). The advantage of DoRL is that it can extract domain-invariant representations from various blood cell datasets in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, we first leverage the large-scale foundation model of SAM, fine-tuned with LoRA, to learn general image embeddings and segment blood cells. Additionally, we introduce CAE to learn domain-invariant representations across different-domain datasets while mitigating images' artifacts. To validate the effectiveness of domain-invariant representations, we employ five widely used machine learning classifiers to construct blood cell classification models. Experimental results on two public blood cell datasets and a private real dataset demonstrate that our proposed DoRL achieves a new state-of-the-art cross-domain performance, surpassing existing methods by a significant margin. The source code can be available at the URL (https://github.com/AnoK3111/DoRL).

Towards Cross-Domain Single Blood Cell Image Classification via Large-Scale LoRA-based Segment Anything Model

Accurate classification of blood cells plays a vital role in hematological analysis as it aids physicians in diagnosing various medical conditions. In this study, we present a novel approach for classifying blood cell images known as BC-SAM. BC-SAM leverages the large-scale foundation model of Segment Anything Model (SAM) and incorporates a fine-tuning technique using LoRA, allowing it to extract general image embeddings from blood cell images. To enhance the applicability of BC-SAM across different blood cell image datasets, we introduce an unsupervised cross-domain autoencoder that focuses on learning intrinsic features while suppressing artifacts in the images. To assess the performance of BC-SAM, we employ four widely used machine learning classifiers (Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, Artificial Neural Network, and XGBoost) to construct blood cell classification models and compare them against existing state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results conducted on two publicly available blood cell datasets (Matek-19 and Acevedo-20) demonstrate that our proposed BC-SAM achieves a new state-of-the-art result, surpassing the baseline methods with a significant improvement. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/AnoK3111/BC-SAM.

PowerPM: Foundation Model for Power Systems

The emergence of abundant electricity time series (ETS) data provides ample opportunities for various applications in the power systems, including demand-side management, grid stability, and consumer behavior analysis. Deep learning models have advanced ETS modeling by effectively capturing sequence dependence. Nevertheless, learning a generic representation of ETS data for various applications remains challenging due to the inherently complex hierarchical structure of ETS data. Moreover, ETS data exhibits intricate temporal dependencies and is suscepti ble to the influence of exogenous variables. Furthermore, different instances exhibit diverse electricity consumption behavior. In this paper, we propose a foundation model PowerPM to model ETS data, providing a large-scale, off-the-shelf model for power systems. PowerPM consists of a temporal encoder and a hierarchical encoder. The temporal encoder captures both temporal dependencies in ETS data, considering exogenous variables. The hierarchical encoder models the correlation between hierarchy. Furthermore, PowerPM leverages a novel self-supervised pretraining framework consisting of masked ETS modeling and dual-view contrastive learning, which enable PowerPM to capture temporal dependency within ETS windows and aware the discrepancy across ETS windows, providing two different perspectives to learn generic representation. Our experiments involve five real world scenario datasets, comprising private and public data. Through pre-training on massive ETS data, PowerPM achieves SOTA performance on diverse downstream tasks within the private dataset. Impressively, when transferred to the public datasets, PowerPM maintains its superiority, showcasing its remarkable generalization ability across various tasks and domains. Moreover, ablation studies, few-shot experiments provide additional evidence of the effectiveness of our model.

Unveiling the Flaws: Exploring Imperfections in Synthetic Data and Mitigation Strategies for Large Language Models

Synthetic data has been proposed as a solution to address the issue of high-quality data scarcity in the training of large language models (LLMs). Studies have shown that synthetic data can effectively improve the performance of LLMs on downstream benchmarks. However, despite its potential benefits, our analysis suggests that there may be inherent flaws in synthetic data. The uniform format of synthetic data can lead to pattern overfitting and cause significant shifts in the output distribution, thereby reducing the model's instruction-following capabilities. Our work delves into these specific flaws associated with question-answer (Q-A) pairs, a prevalent type of synthetic data, and presents a method based on unlearning techniques to mitigate these flaws. The empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which can reverse the instruction-following issues caused by pattern overfitting without compromising performance on benchmarks at relatively low cost. Our work has yielded key insights into the effective use of synthetic data, aiming to promote more robust and efficient LLM training.

Full-ECE: A Metric For Token-level Calibration on Large Language Models

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) excel in various domains but face challenges in providing accurate uncertainty estimates, which are crucial for high-stakes applications. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools, demonstrating exceptional performance in language tasks. However, traditional calibration metrics such as Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and classwise-ECE (cw-ECE) are inadequate for LLMs due to their vast vocabularies, data complexity, and distributional focus. To address this, we propose a novel calibration concept called full calibration and introduce its corresponding metric, Full-ECE. Full-ECE evaluates the entire predicted probability distribution, offering a more accurate and robust measure of calibration for LLMs.

Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on a variety of natural language tasks based on just a few examples of natural language instructions, reducing the need for extensive feature engineering. However, most powerful LLMs are closed-source or limited in their capability for languages other than English. In this technical report, we present Baichuan 2, a series of large-scale multilingual language models containing 7 billion and 13 billion parameters, trained from scratch, on 2.6 trillion tokens. Baichuan 2 matches or outperforms other open-source models of similar size on public benchmarks like MMLU, CMMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval. Furthermore, Baichuan 2 excels in vertical domains such as medicine and law. We will release all pre-training model checkpoints to benefit the research community in better understanding the training dynamics of Baichuan 2.

Bridging the KB-Text Gap: Leveraging Structured Knowledge-aware Pre-training for KBQA

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions with factual information such as entities and relations in KBs. However, traditional Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are directly pre-trained on large-scale natural language corpus, which poses challenges for them in understanding and representing complex subgraphs in structured KBs. To bridge the gap between texts and structured KBs, we propose a Structured Knowledge-aware Pre-training method (SKP). In the pre-training stage, we introduce two novel structured knowledge-aware tasks, guiding the model to effectively learn the implicit relationship and better representations of complex subgraphs. In downstream KBQA task, we further design an efficient linearization strategy and an interval attention mechanism, which assist the model to better encode complex subgraphs and shield the interference of irrelevant subgraphs during reasoning respectively. Detailed experiments and analyses on WebQSP verify the effectiveness of SKP, especially the significant improvement in subgraph retrieval (+4.08% H@10).

Proof-of-Contribution-Based Design for Collaborative Machine Learning on Blockchain

We consider a project (model) owner that would like to train a model by utilizing the local private data and compute power of interested data owners, i.e., trainers. Our goal is to design a data marketplace for such decentralized collaborative/federated learning applications that simultaneously provides i) proof-of-contribution based reward allocation so that the trainers are compensated based on their contributions to the trained model; ii) privacy-preserving decentralized model training by avoiding any data movement from data owners; iii) robustness against malicious parties (e.g., trainers aiming to poison the model); iv) verifiability in the sense that the integrity, i.e., correctness, of all computations in the data market protocol including contribution assessment and outlier detection are verifiable through zero-knowledge proofs; and v) efficient and universal design. We propose a blockchain-based marketplace design to achieve all five objectives mentioned above. In our design, we utilize a distributed storage infrastructure and an aggregator aside from the project owner and the trainers. The aggregator is a processing node that performs certain computations, including assessing trainer contributions, removing outliers, and updating hyper-parameters. We execute the proposed data market through a blockchain smart contract. The deployed smart contract ensures that the project owner cannot evade payment, and honest trainers are rewarded based on their contributions at the end of training. Finally, we implement the building blocks of the proposed data market and demonstrate their applicability in practical scenarios through extensive experiments.