Offline Stochastic Optimization of Black-Box Objective Functions

Many challenges in science and engineering, such as drug discovery and communication network design, involve optimizing complex and expensive black-box functions across vast search spaces. Thus, it is essential to leverage existing data to avoid costly active queries of these black-box functions. To this end, while Offline Black-Box Optimization (BBO) is effective for deterministic problems, it may fall short in capturing the stochasticity of real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce Stochastic Offline BBO (SOBBO), which tackles both black-box objectives and uncontrolled uncertainties. We propose two solutions: for large-data regimes, a differentiable surrogate allows for gradient-based optimization, while for scarce-data regimes, we directly estimate gradients under conservative field constraints, improving robustness, convergence, and data efficiency. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both synthetic and real-world tasks.

Transcending Language Boundaries: Harnessing LLMs for Low-Resource Language Translation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks and domains. However, their performance in low-resource language translation, particularly when translating into these languages, remains underexplored. This gap poses significant challenges, as linguistic barriers hinder the cultural preservation and development of minority communities. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel retrieval-based method that enhances translation quality for low-resource languages by focusing on key terms, which involves translating keywords and retrieving corresponding examples from existing data. To evaluate the effectiveness of this method, we conducted experiments translating from English into three low-resource languages: Cherokee, a critically endangered indigenous language of North America; Tibetan, a historically and culturally significant language in Asia; and Manchu, a language with few remaining speakers. Our comparison with the zero-shot performance of GPT-4o and LLaMA 3.1 405B, highlights the significant challenges these models face when translating into low-resource languages. In contrast, our retrieval-based method shows promise in improving both word-level accuracy and overall semantic understanding by leveraging existing resources more effectively.

Towards Next-Generation Medical Agent: How o1 is Reshaping Decision-Making in Medical Scenarios

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become essential in modern healthcare, with large language models (LLMs) offering promising advances in clinical decision-making. Traditional model-based approaches, including those leveraging in-context demonstrations and those with specialized medical fine-tuning, have demonstrated strong performance in medical language processing but struggle with real-time adaptability, multi-step reasoning, and handling complex medical tasks. Agent-based AI systems address these limitations by incorporating reasoning traces, tool selection based on context, knowledge retrieval, and both short- and long-term memory. These additional features enable the medical AI agent to handle complex medical scenarios where decision-making should be built on real-time interaction with the environment. Therefore, unlike conventional model-based approaches that treat medical queries as isolated questions, medical AI agents approach them as complex tasks and behave more like human doctors. In this paper, we study the choice of the backbone LLM for medical AI agents, which is the foundation for the agent's overall reasoning and action generation. In particular, we consider the emergent o1 model and examine its impact on agents' reasoning, tool-use adaptability, and real-time information retrieval across diverse clinical scenarios, including high-stakes settings such as intensive care units (ICUs). Our findings demonstrate o1's ability to enhance diagnostic accuracy and consistency, paving the way for smarter, more responsive AI tools that support better patient outcomes and decision-making efficacy in clinical practice.

Large Language Models for Manufacturing

The rapid advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to transform manufacturing industry, offering new opportunities to optimize processes, improve efficiency, and drive innovation. This paper provides a comprehensive exploration of the integration of LLMs into the manufacturing domain, focusing on their potential to automate and enhance various aspects of manufacturing, from product design and development to quality control, supply chain optimization, and talent management. Through extensive evaluations across multiple manufacturing tasks, we demonstrate the remarkable capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT-4V, in understanding and executing complex instructions, extracting valuable insights from vast amounts of data, and facilitating knowledge sharing. We also delve into the transformative potential of LLMs in reshaping manufacturing education, automating coding processes, enhancing robot control systems, and enabling the creation of immersive, data-rich virtual environments through the industrial metaverse. By highlighting the practical applications and emerging use cases of LLMs in manufacturing, this paper aims to provide a valuable resource for professionals, researchers, and decision-makers seeking to harness the power of these technologies to address real-world challenges, drive operational excellence, and unlock sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive landscape.

EG-SpikeFormer: Eye-Gaze Guided Transformer on Spiking Neural Networks for Medical Image Analysis

Neuromorphic computing has emerged as a promising energy-efficient alternative to traditional artificial intelligence, predominantly utilizing spiking neural networks (SNNs) implemented on neuromorphic hardware. Significant advancements have been made in SNN-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer architectures. However, their applications in the medical imaging domain remain underexplored. In this study, we introduce EG-SpikeFormer, an SNN architecture designed for clinical tasks that integrates eye-gaze data to guide the model's focus on diagnostically relevant regions in medical images. This approach effectively addresses shortcut learning issues commonly observed in conventional models, especially in scenarios with limited clinical data and high demands for model reliability, generalizability, and transparency. Our EG-SpikeFormer not only demonstrates superior energy efficiency and performance in medical image classification tasks but also enhances clinical relevance. By incorporating eye-gaze data, the model improves interpretability and generalization, opening new directions for the application of neuromorphic computing in healthcare.

ECHOPulse: ECG controlled echocardio-grams video generation

Echocardiography (ECHO) is essential for cardiac assessments, but its video quality and interpretation heavily relies on manual expertise, leading to inconsistent results from clinical and portable devices. ECHO video generation offers a solution by improving automated monitoring through synthetic data and generating high-quality videos from routine health data. However, existing models often face high computational costs, slow inference, and rely on complex conditional prompts that require experts' annotations. To address these challenges, we propose ECHOPULSE, an ECG-conditioned ECHO video generation model. ECHOPULSE introduces two key advancements: (1) it accelerates ECHO video generation by leveraging VQ-VAE tokenization and masked visual token modeling for fast decoding, and (2) it conditions on readily accessible ECG signals, which are highly coherent with ECHO videos, bypassing complex conditional prompts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use time-series prompts like ECG signals for ECHO video generation. ECHOPULSE not only enables controllable synthetic ECHO data generation but also provides updated cardiac function information for disease monitoring and prediction beyond ECG alone. Evaluations on three public and private datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in ECHO video generation across both qualitative and quantitative measures. Additionally, ECHOPULSE can be easily generalized to other modality generation tasks, such as cardiac MRI, fMRI, and 3D CT generation. Demo can seen from \url{https://github.com/levyisthebest/ECHOPulse_Prelease}.

Evaluation of OpenAI o1: Opportunities and Challenges of AGI

This comprehensive study evaluates the performance of OpenAI's o1-preview large language model across a diverse array of complex reasoning tasks, spanning multiple domains, including computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, medicine, linguistics, and social sciences. Through rigorous testing, o1-preview demonstrated remarkable capabilities, often achieving human-level or superior performance in areas ranging from coding challenges to scientific reasoning and from language processing to creative problem-solving. Key findings include: -83.3% success rate in solving complex competitive programming problems, surpassing many human experts. -Superior ability in generating coherent and accurate radiology reports, outperforming other evaluated models. -100% accuracy in high school-level mathematical reasoning tasks, providing detailed step-by-step solutions. -Advanced natural language inference capabilities across general and specialized domains like medicine. -Impressive performance in chip design tasks, outperforming specialized models in areas such as EDA script generation and bug analysis. -Remarkable proficiency in anthropology and geology, demonstrating deep understanding and reasoning in these specialized fields. -Strong capabilities in quantitative investing. O1 has comprehensive financial knowledge and statistical modeling skills. -Effective performance in social media analysis, including sentiment analysis and emotion recognition. The model excelled particularly in tasks requiring intricate reasoning and knowledge integration across various fields. While some limitations were observed, including occasional errors on simpler problems and challenges with certain highly specialized concepts, the overall results indicate significant progress towards artificial general intelligence.

HARP: Human-Assisted Regrouping with Permutation Invariant Critic for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning integrates human expertise to accelerate agent learning and provide critical guidance and feedback in complex fields. However, many existing approaches focus on single-agent tasks and require continuous human involvement during the training process, significantly increasing the human workload and limiting scalability. In this paper, we propose HARP (Human-Assisted Regrouping with Permutation Invariant Critic), a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework designed for group-oriented tasks. HARP integrates automatic agent regrouping with strategic human assistance during deployment, enabling and allowing non-experts to offer effective guidance with minimal intervention. During training, agents dynamically adjust their groupings to optimize collaborative task completion. When deployed, they actively seek human assistance and utilize the Permutation Invariant Group Critic to evaluate and refine human-proposed groupings, allowing non-expert users to contribute valuable suggestions. In multiple collaboration scenarios, our approach is able to leverage limited guidance from non-experts and enhance performance. The project can be found at https://github.com/huawen-hu/HARP.

GP-GPT: Large Language Model for Gene-Phenotype Mapping

Pre-trained large language models(LLMs) have attracted increasing attention in biomedical domains due to their success in natural language processing. However, the complex traits and heterogeneity of multi-sources genomics data pose significant challenges when adapting these models to the bioinformatics and biomedical field. To address these challenges, we present GP-GPT, the first specialized large language model for genetic-phenotype knowledge representation and genomics relation analysis. Our model is fine-tuned in two stages on a comprehensive corpus composed of over 3,000,000 terms in genomics, proteomics, and medical genetics, derived from multiple large-scale validated datasets and scientific publications. GP-GPT demonstrates proficiency in accurately retrieving medical genetics information and performing common genomics analysis tasks, such as genomics information retrieval and relationship determination. Comparative experiments across domain-specific tasks reveal that GP-GPT outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs, including Llama2, Llama3 and GPT-4. These results highlight GP-GPT's potential to enhance genetic disease relation research and facilitate accurate and efficient analysis in the fields of genomics and medical genetics. Our investigation demonstrated the subtle changes of bio-factor entities' representations in the GP-GPT, which suggested the opportunities for the application of LLMs to advancing gene-phenotype research.

Examining the Commitments and Difficulties Inherent in Multimodal Foundation Models for Street View Imagery

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal foundation models (FMs) has generated heightened interest in their applications that integrate vision and language. This paper investigates the capabilities of ChatGPT-4V and Gemini Pro for Street View Imagery, Built Environment, and Interior by evaluating their performance across various tasks. The assessments include street furniture identification, pedestrian and car counts, and road width measurement in Street View Imagery; building function classification, building age analysis, building height analysis, and building structure classification in the Built Environment; and interior room classification, interior design style analysis, interior furniture counts, and interior length measurement in Interior. The results reveal proficiency in length measurement, style analysis, question answering, and basic image understanding, but highlight limitations in detailed recognition and counting tasks. While zero-shot learning shows potential, performance varies depending on the problem domains and image complexities. This study provides new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of multimodal foundation models for practical challenges in Street View Imagery, Built Environment, and Interior. Overall, the findings demonstrate foundational multimodal intelligence, emphasizing the potential of FMs to drive forward interdisciplinary applications at the intersection of computer vision and language.