Addressing Overprescribing Challenges: Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Medication Recommendation Tasks

Medication recommendation systems have garnered attention within healthcare for their potential to deliver personalized and efficacious drug combinations based on patient's clinical data. However, existing methodologies encounter challenges in adapting to diverse Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems and effectively utilizing unstructured data, resulting in limited generalization capabilities and suboptimal performance. Recently, interest is growing in harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs) in the medical domain to support healthcare professionals and enhance patient care. Despite the emergence of medical LLMs and their promising results in tasks like medical question answering, their practical applicability in clinical settings, particularly in medication recommendation, often remains underexplored. In this study, we evaluate both general-purpose and medical-specific LLMs for medication recommendation tasks. Our findings reveal that LLMs frequently encounter the challenge of overprescribing, leading to heightened clinical risks and diminished medication recommendation accuracy. To address this issue, we propose Language-Assisted Medication Recommendation (LAMO), which employs a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach to tailor open-source LLMs for optimal performance in medication recommendation scenarios. LAMO leverages the wealth of clinical information within clinical notes, a resource often underutilized in traditional methodologies. As a result of our approach, LAMO outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by over 10% in internal validation accuracy. Furthermore, temporal and external validations demonstrate LAMO's robust generalization capabilities across various temporal and hospital contexts. Additionally, an out-of-distribution medication recommendation experiment demonstrates LAMO's remarkable accuracy even with medications outside the training data.

Med-LEGO: Editing and Adapting toward Generalist Medical Image Diagnosis

The adoption of visual foundation models has become a common practice in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD). While these foundation models provide a viable solution for creating generalist medical AI, privacy concerns make it difficult to pre-train or continuously update such models across multiple domains and datasets, leading many studies to focus on specialist models. To address this challenge, we propose Med-LEGO, a training-free framework that enables the seamless integration or updating of a generalist CAD model by combining multiple specialist models, similar to assembling LEGO bricks. Med-LEGO enhances LoRA (low-rank adaptation) by incorporating singular value decomposition (SVD) to efficiently capture the domain expertise of each specialist model with minimal additional parameters. By combining these adapted weights through simple operations, Med-LEGO allows for the easy integration or modification of specific diagnostic capabilities without the need for original data or retraining. Finally, the combined model can be further adapted to new diagnostic tasks, making it a versatile generalist model. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Med-LEGO outperforms existing methods in both cross-domain and in-domain medical tasks while using only 0.18% of full model parameters. These merged models show better convergence and generalization to new tasks, providing an effective path toward generalist medical AI.

Privacy-Preserving Hybrid Ensemble Model for Network Anomaly Detection: Balancing Security and Data Protection

Privacy-preserving network anomaly detection has become an essential area of research due to growing concerns over the protection of sensitive data. Traditional anomaly de- tection models often prioritize accuracy while neglecting the critical aspect of privacy. In this work, we propose a hybrid ensemble model that incorporates privacy-preserving techniques to address both detection accuracy and data protection. Our model combines the strengths of several machine learning algo- rithms, including K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), XGBoost, and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), to create a robust system capable of identifying network anomalies while ensuring privacy. The proposed approach in- tegrates advanced preprocessing techniques that enhance data quality and address the challenges of small sample sizes and imbalanced datasets. By embedding privacy measures into the model design, our solution offers a significant advancement over existing methods, ensuring both enhanced detection performance and strong privacy safeguards.

Artistic Neural Style Transfer Algorithms with Activation Smoothing

The works of Gatys et al. demonstrated the capability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in creating artistic style images. This process of transferring content images in different styles is called Neural Style Transfer (NST). In this paper, we re-implement image-based NST, fast NST, and arbitrary NST. We also explore to utilize ResNet with activation smoothing in NST. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that smoothing transformation can greatly improve the quality of stylization results.

Pseudo-Probability Unlearning: Towards Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Machine Unlearning

Machine unlearning--enabling a trained model to forget specific data--is crucial for addressing biased data and adhering to privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)'s "right to be forgotten". Recent works have paid little attention to privacy concerns, leaving the data intended for forgetting vulnerable to membership inference attacks. Moreover, they often come with high computational overhead. In this work, we propose Pseudo-Probability Unlearning (PPU), a novel method that enables models to forget data efficiently and in a privacy-preserving manner. Our method replaces the final-layer output probabilities of the neural network with pseudo-probabilities for the data to be forgotten. These pseudo-probabilities follow either a uniform distribution or align with the model's overall distribution, enhancing privacy and reducing risk of membership inference attacks. Our optimization strategy further refines the predictive probability distributions and updates the model's weights accordingly, ensuring effective forgetting with minimal impact on the model's overall performance. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, our method achieves over 20% improvements in forgetting error compared to the state-of-the-art. Additionally, our method enhances privacy by preventing the forgotten set from being inferred to around random guesses.

A Recommendation Model Utilizing Separation Embedding and Self-Attention for Feature Mining

With the explosive growth of Internet data, users are facing the problem of information overload, which makes it a challenge to efficiently obtain the required resources. Recommendation systems have emerged in this context. By filtering massive amounts of information, they provide users with content that meets their needs, playing a key role in scenarios such as advertising recommendation and product recommendation. However, traditional click-through rate prediction and TOP-K recommendation mechanisms are gradually unable to meet the recommendations needs in modern life scenarios due to high computational complexity, large memory consumption, long feature selection time, and insufficient feature interaction. This paper proposes a recommendations system model based on a separation embedding cross-network. The model uses an embedding neural network layer to transform sparse feature vectors into dense embedding vectors, and can independently perform feature cross operations on different dimensions, thereby improving the accuracy and depth of feature mining. Experimental results show that the model shows stronger adaptability and higher prediction accuracy in processing complex data sets, effectively solving the problems existing in existing models.

UniCoN: Universal Conditional Networks for Multi-Age Embryonic Cartilage Segmentation with Sparsely Annotated Data

Osteochondrodysplasia, affecting 2-3% of newborns globally, is a group of bone and cartilage disorders that often result in head malformations, contributing to childhood morbidity and reduced quality of life. Current research on this disease using mouse models faces challenges since it involves accurately segmenting the developing cartilage in 3D micro-CT images of embryonic mice. Tackling this segmentation task with deep learning (DL) methods is laborious due to the big burden of manual image annotation, expensive due to the high acquisition costs of 3D micro-CT images, and difficult due to embryonic cartilage's complex and rapidly changing shapes. While DL approaches have been proposed to automate cartilage segmentation, most such models have limited accuracy and generalizability, especially across data from different embryonic age groups. To address these limitations, we propose novel DL methods that can be adopted by any DL architectures -- including CNNs, Transformers, or hybrid models -- which effectively leverage age and spatial information to enhance model performance. Specifically, we propose two new mechanisms, one conditioned on discrete age categories and the other on continuous image crop locations, to enable an accurate representation of cartilage shape changes across ages and local shape details throughout the cranial region. Extensive experiments on multi-age cartilage segmentation datasets show significant and consistent performance improvements when integrating our conditional modules into popular DL segmentation architectures. On average, we achieve a 1.7% Dice score increase with minimal computational overhead and a 7.5% improvement on unseen data. These results highlight the potential of our approach for developing robust, universal models capable of handling diverse datasets with limited annotated data, a key challenge in DL-based medical image analysis.

RIPPLECOT: Amplifying Ripple Effect of Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Chain-of-Thought In-Context Learning

The ripple effect poses a significant challenge in knowledge editing for large language models. Namely, when a single fact is edited, the model struggles to accurately update the related facts in a sequence, which is evaluated by multi-hop questions linked to a chain of related facts. Recent strategies have moved away from traditional parameter updates to more flexible, less computation-intensive methods, proven to be more effective in addressing the ripple effect. In-context learning (ICL) editing uses a simple demonstration `Imagine that + new fact` to guide LLMs, but struggles with complex multi-hop questions as the new fact alone fails to specify the chain of facts involved in such scenarios. Besides, memory-based editing maintains additional storage for all edits and related facts, requiring continuous updates to stay effective. As a result of these design limitations, the challenge remains, with the highest accuracy being only 33.8% on the MQuAKE-cf benchmarks for Vicuna-7B. To address this, we propose RippleCOT, a novel ICL editing approach integrating Chain-of-Thought (COT) reasoning. RippleCOT structures demonstrations as `newfact, question, thought, answer`, incorporating a thought component to identify and decompose the multi-hop logic within questions. This approach effectively guides the model through complex multi-hop questions with chains of related facts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RippleCOT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on the ripple effect, achieving accuracy gains ranging from 7.8% to 87.1%.

Knowledge-Guided Prompt Learning for Lifespan Brain MR Image Segmentation

Automatic and accurate segmentation of brain MR images throughout the human lifespan into tissue and structure is crucial for understanding brain development and diagnosing diseases. However, challenges arise from the intricate variations in brain appearance due to rapid early brain development, aging, and disorders, compounded by the limited availability of manually-labeled datasets. In response, we present a two-step segmentation framework employing Knowledge-Guided Prompt Learning (KGPL) for brain MRI. Specifically, we first pre-train segmentation models on large-scale datasets with sub-optimal labels, followed by the incorporation of knowledge-driven embeddings learned from image-text alignment into the models. The introduction of knowledge-wise prompts captures semantic relationships between anatomical variability and biological processes, enabling models to learn structural feature embeddings across diverse age groups. Experimental findings demonstrate the superiority and robustness of our proposed method, particularly noticeable when employing Swin UNETR as the backbone. Our approach achieves average DSC values of 95.17% and 94.19% for brain tissue and structure segmentation, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/TL9792/KGPL.

Enhancing Parameter Efficiency and Generalization in Large-Scale Models: A Regularized and Masked Low-Rank Adaptation Approach

Large pre-trained models, such as large language models (LLMs), present significant resource challenges for fine-tuning due to their extensive parameter sizes, especially for applications in mobile systems. To address this, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has been developed to reduce resource consumption while maintaining satisfactory fine-tuning results. Despite its effectiveness, the original LoRA method faces challenges of suboptimal performance and overfitting. This paper investigates the intrinsic dimension of the matrix updates approximated by the LoRA method and reveals the performance benefits of increasing this intrinsic dimension. By employing regularization and a gradient masking method that encourages higher intrinsic dimension, the proposed method, termed Regularized and Masked LoRA (RM-LoRA), achieves superior generalization performance with the same or lower trainable parameter budget compared to the original LoRA and its latest variants across various open-source vision and language datasets.