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Motivated by emerging urban applications in commercial, public sector, and humanitarian logistics, we revisit continuous $p$-hub location problems in which several facilities must be located in a continuous space such that the expected minimum Manhattan travel distance from a random service provider to a random customer through exactly one hub facility is minimized. In this paper, we begin by deriving closed-form results for a one-dimensional case and two-dimensional cases with up to two hubs. Subsequently, a simulation-based approximation method is proposed for more complex two-dimensional scenarios with more than two hubs. Moreover, an extended problem with multiple service providers is analyzed to reflect real-life service settings. Finally, we apply our model and approximation method using publicly available data as a case study to optimize the deployment of public-access automated external defibrillators in Virginia Beach.

Chart understanding tasks such as ChartQA and Chart-to-Text involve automatically extracting and interpreting key information from charts, enabling users to query or convert visual data into structured formats. State-of-the-art approaches primarily focus on visual cues from chart images, failing to explicitly incorporate rich textual information (e.g., data labels and axis labels) embedded within the charts. This textual information is vital for intuitive human comprehension and interpretation of charts. Moreover, existing models are often large and computationally intensive, limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we introduce AskChart, a universal model that explicitly integrates both textual and visual cues from charts using a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. AskChart facilitates the learning of enhanced visual-textual representations of charts for effectively handling multiple chart understanding tasks, while maintaining a smaller model size. To capture the synergy between visual and textual modalities, we curate a large-scale dataset named ChartBank with about 7.5M data samples, which helps align textual and visual information and facilitates the extraction of visual entities and text. To effectively train AskChart, we design a three-stage training strategy to align visual and textual modalities for learning robust visual-textual representations and optimizing the learning of the MoE layer. Extensive experiments across five datasets demonstrate the significant performance gains of AskChart in four chart understanding tasks. Remarkably, AskChart with 4.6B parameters outperforms state-of-the-art models with 13B parameters by 68.3% in Open-ended ChartQA and 49.2% in Chart-to-Text tasks, while achieving comparable performance in ChartQA and Chart-to-Table tasks., Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, 14 tables

Previous research has shown that constraining the gradient of loss function with respect to model-predicted probabilities can enhance the model robustness against noisy labels. These methods typically specify a fixed optimal threshold for gradient clipping through validation data to obtain the desired robustness against noise. However, this common practice overlooks the dynamic distribution of gradients from both clean and noisy-labeled samples at different stages of training, significantly limiting the model capability to adapt to the variable nature of gradients throughout the training process. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective approach called Optimized Gradient Clipping (OGC), which dynamically adjusts the clipping threshold based on the ratio of noise gradients to clean gradients after clipping, estimated by modeling the distributions of clean and noisy samples. This approach allows us to modify the clipping threshold at each training step, effectively controlling the influence of noise gradients. Additionally, we provide statistical analysis to certify the noise-tolerance ability of OGC. Our extensive experiments across various types of label noise, including symmetric, asymmetric, instance-dependent, and real-world noise, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach., Comment: Accepted by AAAI2025

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is an essential approach to robustifying deep learning models, enabling them to identify inputs that fall outside of their trained distribution. Existing OOD detection methods usually depend on crafted data, such as specific outlier datasets or elaborate data augmentations. While this is reasonable, the frequent mismatch between crafted data and OOD data limits model robustness and generalizability. In response to this issue, we introduce Outlier Exposure by Simple Transformations (OEST), a framework that enhances OOD detection by leveraging "peripheral-distribution" (PD) data. Specifically, PD data are samples generated through simple data transformations, thus providing an efficient alternative to manually curated outliers. We adopt energy-based models (EBMs) to study PD data. We recognize the "energy barrier" in OOD detection, which characterizes the energy difference between in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples and eases detection. PD data are introduced to establish the energy barrier during training. Furthermore, this energy barrier concept motivates a theoretically grounded energy-barrier loss to replace the classical energy-bounded loss, leading to an improved paradigm, OEST*, which achieves a more effective and theoretically sound separation between ID and OOD samples. We perform empirical validation of our proposal, and extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that OEST* achieves better or similar accuracy compared with state-of-the-art methods., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication

Deep supervised learning has achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, yet it remains susceptible to overfitting when confronted with noisy labels. To address this issue, noise-robust loss functions offer an effective solution for enhancing learning in the presence of label noise. In this work, we systematically investigate the limitation of the recently proposed Active Passive Loss (APL), which employs Mean Absolute Error (MAE) as its passive loss function. Despite the robustness brought by MAE, one of its key drawbacks is that it pays equal attention to clean and noisy samples; this feature slows down convergence and potentially makes training difficult, particularly in large-scale datasets. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel loss function class, termed Normalized Negative Loss Functions (NNLFs), which serve as passive loss functions within the APL framework. NNLFs effectively address the limitations of MAE by concentrating more on memorized clean samples. By replacing MAE in APL with our proposed NNLFs, we enhance APL and present a new framework called Active Negative Loss (ANL). Moreover, in non-symmetric noise scenarios, we propose an entropy-based regularization technique to mitigate the vulnerability to the label imbalance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the new loss functions adopted by our ANL framework can achieve better or comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods across various label noise types and in image segmentation tasks. The source code is available at: https://github.com/Virusdoll/Active-Negative-Loss., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication

Most current molecular language models transfer the masked language model or image-text generation model from natural language processing to molecular field. However, molecules are not solely characterized by atom/bond symbols; they encapsulate important physical/chemical properties. Moreover, normal language models bring grammar rules that are irrelevant for understanding molecules. In this study, we propose a novel physicochemical knowledge-guided molecular meta language framework MolMetaLM. We design a molecule-specialized meta language paradigm, formatted as multiple (subject, predicate, object) knowledge triples sharing the same S (i.e., molecule) to enhance learning the semantic relationships between physicochemical knowledge and molecules. By introducing different molecular knowledge and noises, the meta language paradigm generates tens of thousands of pretraining tasks. By recovering the token/sequence/order-level noises, MolMetaLM exhibits proficiency in large-scale benchmark evaluations involving property prediction, molecule generation, conformation inference, and molecular optimization. Through MolMetaLM, we offer a new insight for designing language models.

Geospatial predictions are crucial for diverse fields such as disaster management, urban planning, and public health. Traditional machine learning methods often face limitations when handling unstructured or multi-modal data like street view imagery. To address these challenges, we propose StreetViewLLM, a novel framework that integrates a large language model with the chain-of-thought reasoning and multimodal data sources. By combining street view imagery with geographic coordinates and textual data, StreetViewLLM improves the precision and granularity of geospatial predictions. Using retrieval-augmented generation techniques, our approach enhances geographic information extraction, enabling a detailed analysis of urban environments. The model has been applied to seven global cities, including Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, New York, London, and Paris, demonstrating superior performance in predicting urban indicators, including population density, accessibility to healthcare, normalized difference vegetation index, building height, and impervious surface. The results show that StreetViewLLM consistently outperforms baseline models, offering improved predictive accuracy and deeper insights into the built environment. This research opens new opportunities for integrating the large language model into urban analytics, decision-making in urban planning, infrastructure management, and environmental monitoring.

Humans and AIs are often paired on decision tasks with the expectation of achieving complementary performance -- where the combination of human and AI outperforms either one alone. However, how to improve performance of a human-AI team is often not clear without knowing more about what particular information and strategies each agent employs. In this paper, we propose a model based in statistical decision theory to analyze human-AI collaboration from the perspective of what information could be used to improve a human or AI decision. We demonstrate our model on a deepfake detection task to investigate seven video-level features by their unexploited value of information. We compare the human alone, AI alone and human-AI team and offer insights on how the AI assistance impacts people's usage of the information and what information that the AI exploits well might be useful for improving human decisions.

Autoformalization, the task of automatically translating natural language descriptions into a formal language, poses a significant challenge across various domains, especially in mathematics. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have unveiled their promising capabilities to formalize even competition-level math problems. However, we observe a considerable discrepancy between pass@1 and pass@k accuracies in LLM-generated formalizations. To address this gap, we introduce a novel framework that scores and selects the best result from k autoformalization candidates based on two complementary self-consistency methods: symbolic equivalence and semantic consistency. Elaborately, symbolic equivalence identifies the logical homogeneity among autoformalization candidates using automated theorem provers, and semantic consistency evaluates the preservation of the original meaning by informalizing the candidates and computing the similarity between the embeddings of the original and informalized texts. Our extensive experiments on the MATH and miniF2F datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances autoformalization accuracy, achieving up to 0.22-1.35x relative improvements across various LLMs and baseline methods., Comment: Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2024. Code is available at https://github.com/Miracle-Messi/Isa-AutoFormal

The emergence of 6th generation (6G) mobile networks brings new challenges in supporting high-mobility communications, particularly in addressing the issue of channel aging. While existing channel prediction methods offer improved accuracy at the expense of increased computational complexity, limiting their practical application in mobile networks. To address these challenges, we present LinFormer, an innovative channel prediction framework based on a scalable, all-linear, encoder-only Transformer model. Our approach, inspired by natural language processing (NLP) models such as BERT, adapts an encoder-only architecture specifically for channel prediction tasks. We propose replacing the computationally intensive attention mechanism commonly used in Transformers with a time-aware multi-layer perceptron (TMLP), significantly reducing computational demands. The inherent time awareness of TMLP module makes it particularly suitable for channel prediction tasks. We enhance LinFormer's training process by employing a weighted mean squared error loss (WMSELoss) function and data augmentation techniques, leveraging larger, readily available communication datasets. Our approach achieves a substantial reduction in computational complexity while maintaining high prediction accuracy, making it more suitable for deployment in cost-effective base stations (BS). Comprehensive experiments using both simulated and measured data demonstrate that LinFormer outperforms existing methods across various mobility scenarios, offering a promising solution for future wireless communication systems.

Gene-gene interactions play a crucial role in the manifestation of complex human diseases. Uncovering significant gene-gene interactions is a challenging task. Here, we present an innovative approach utilizing data-driven computational tools, leveraging an advanced Transformer model, to unearth noteworthy gene-gene interactions. Despite the efficacy of Transformer models, their parameter intensity presents a bottleneck in data ingestion, hindering data efficiency. To mitigate this, we introduce a novel weighted diversified sampling algorithm. This algorithm computes the diversity score of each data sample in just two passes of the dataset, facilitating efficient subset generation for interaction discovery. Our extensive experimentation demonstrates that by sampling a mere 1\% of the single-cell dataset, we achieve performance comparable to that of utilizing the entire dataset.

We consider a retailer running a switchback experiment for the price of a single product, with infinite supply. In each period, the seller chooses a price $p$ from a set of predefined prices that consist of a reference price and a few discounted price levels. The goal is to estimate the demand gradient at the reference price point, with the goal of adjusting the reference price to improve revenue after the experiment. In our model, in each period, a unit mass of buyers arrives on the market, with values distributed based on a time-varying process. Crucially, buyers are forward looking with a discounted utility and will choose to not purchase now if they expect to face a discounted price in the near future. We show that forward-looking demand introduces bias in naive estimators of the demand gradient, due to intertemporal interference. Furthermore, we prove that there is no estimator that uses data from price experiments with only two price points that can recover the correct demand gradient, even in the limit of an infinitely long experiment with an infinitesimal price discount. Moreover, we characterize the form of the bias of naive estimators. Finally, we show that with a simple three price level experiment, the seller can remove the bias due to strategic forward-looking behavior and construct an estimator for the demand gradient that asymptotically recovers the truth.

Tactile sensors play a crucial role in enabling robots to interact effectively and safely with objects in everyday tasks. In particular, visuotactile sensors have seen increasing usage in two and three-fingered grippers due to their high-quality feedback. However, a significant gap remains in the development of sensors suitable for humanoid robots, especially five-fingered dexterous hands. One reason is because of the challenges in designing and manufacturing sensors that are compact in size. In this paper, we propose HumanFT, a multimodal visuotactile sensor that replicates the shape and functionality of a human fingertip. To bridge the gap between human and robotic tactile sensing, our sensor features real-time force measurements, high-frequency vibration detection, and overtemperature alerts. To achieve this, we developed a suite of fabrication techniques for a new type of elastomer optimized for force propagation and temperature sensing. Besides, our sensor integrates circuits capable of sensing pressure and vibration. These capabilities have been validated through experiments. The proposed design is simple and cost-effective to fabricate. We believe HumanFT can enhance humanoid robots' perception by capturing and interpreting multimodal tactile information., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication

Dense features, customized for different business scenarios, are essential in short video classification. However, their complexity, specific adaptation requirements, and high computational costs make them resource-intensive and less accessible during online inference. Consequently, these dense features are categorized as `Privileged Dense Features'.Meanwhile, end-to-end multi-modal models have shown promising results in numerous computer vision tasks. In industrial applications, prioritizing end-to-end multi-modal features, can enhance efficiency but often leads to the loss of valuable information from historical privileged dense features. To integrate both features while maintaining efficiency and manageable resource costs, we present Confidence-aware Privileged Feature Distillation (CPFD), which empowers features of an end-to-end multi-modal model by adaptively distilling privileged features during training. Unlike existing privileged feature distillation (PFD) methods, which apply uniform weights to all instances during distillation, potentially causing unstable performance across different business scenarios and a notable performance gap between teacher model (Dense Feature enhanced multimodal-model DF-X-VLM) and student model (multimodal-model only X-VLM), our CPFD leverages confidence scores derived from the teacher model to adaptively mitigate the performance variance with the student model. We conducted extensive offline experiments on five diverse tasks demonstrating that CPFD improves the video classification F1 score by 6.76% compared with end-to-end multimodal-model (X-VLM) and by 2.31% with vanilla PFD on-average. And it reduces the performance gap by 84.6% and achieves results comparable to teacher model DF-X-VLM. The effectiveness of CPFD is further substantiated by online experiments, and our framework has been deployed in production systems for over a dozen models., Comment: Camera ready for CIKM 2024

Parser-based log compressors have been widely explored in recent years because the explosive growth of log volumes makes the compression performance of general-purpose compressors unsatisfactory. These parser-based compressors preprocess logs by grouping the logs based on the parsing result and then feed the preprocessed files into a general-purpose compressor. However, parser-based compressors have their limitations. First, the goals of parsing and compression are misaligned, so the inherent characteristics of logs were not fully utilized. In addition, the performance of parser-based compressors depends on the sample logs and thus it is very unstable. Moreover, parser-based compressors often incur a long processing time. To address these limitations, we propose Denum, a simple, general log compressor with high compression ratio and speed. The core insight is that a majority of the tokens in logs are numeric tokens (i.e. pure numbers, tokens with only numbers and special characters, and numeric variables) and effective compression of them is critical for log compression. Specifically, Denum contains a Numeric Token Parsing module, which extracts all numeric tokens and applies tailored processing methods (e.g. store the differences of incremental numbers like timestamps), and a String Processing module, which processes the remaining log content without numbers. The processed files of the two modules are then fed as input to a general-purpose compressor and it outputs the final compression results. Denum has been evaluated on 16 log datasets and it achieves an 8.7%-434.7% higher average compression ratio and 2.6x-37.7x faster average compression speed (i.e. 26.2MB/S) compared to the baselines. Moreover, integrating Denum's Numeric Token Parsing into existing log compressors can provide an 11.8% improvement in their average compression ratio and achieve 37% faster average compression speed., Comment: Accepted by 2024 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'24)

Previous studies aiming to optimize and bundle-adjust camera poses using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), such as BARF and DBARF, have demonstrated impressive capabilities in 3D scene reconstruction. However, these approaches have been designed for pinhole-camera pose optimization and do not perform well under radial image distortions such as those in fisheye cameras. Furthermore, inaccurate depth initialization in DBARF results in erroneous geometric information affecting the overall convergence and quality of results. In this paper, we propose adaptive GRUs with a flexible bundle-adjustment method adapted to radial distortions and incorporate feature-based recurrent neural networks to generate continuous novel views from fisheye datasets. Other NeRF methods for fisheye images, such as SCNeRF and OMNI-NeRF, use projected ray distance loss for distorted pose refinement, causing severe artifacts, long rendering time, and are difficult to use in downstream tasks, where the dense voxel representation generated by a NeRF method needs to be converted into a mesh representation. We also address depth initialization issues by adding MiDaS-based depth priors for pinhole images. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the generalization capacity of FBINeRF and show high-fidelity results for both pinhole-camera and fisheye-camera NeRFs., Comment: 18 pages

In this study, we introduce the More-Interaction Particle Transformer (MIParT), a novel deep learning neural network designed for jet tagging. This framework incorporates our own design, the More-Interaction Attention (MIA) mechanism, which increases the dimensionality of particle interaction embeddings. We tested MIParT using the top tagging and quark-gluon datasets. Our results show that MIParT not only matches the accuracy and AUC of LorentzNet and a series of Lorentz-equivariant methods, but also significantly outperforms the ParT model in background rejection. Specifically, it improves background rejection by approximately 25% at a 30% signal efficiency on the top tagging dataset and by 3% on the quark-gluon dataset. Additionally, MIParT requires only 30% of the parameters and 53% of the computational complexity needed by ParT, proving that high performance can be achieved with reduced model complexity. For very large datasets, we double the dimension of particle embeddings, referring to this variant as MIParT-Large (MIParT-L). We find that MIParT-L can further capitalize on the knowledge from large datasets. From a model pre-trained on the 100M JetClass dataset, the background rejection performance of the fine-tuned MIParT-L improved by 39% on the top tagging dataset and by 6% on the quark-gluon dataset, surpassing that of the fine-tuned ParT. Specifically, the background rejection of fine-tuned MIParT-L improved by an additional 2% compared to the fine-tuned ParT. The results suggest that MIParT has the potential to advance efficiency benchmarks for jet tagging and event identification in particle physics. The code is available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/USST-HEP/MIParT, Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables. The code is available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/USST-HEP/MIParT

As software systems grow increasingly intricate, Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) methods have been widely used in software system failure management to ensure the high availability and reliability of large-scale distributed software systems. However, these methods still face several challenges, such as lack of cross-platform generality and cross-task flexibility. Fortunately, recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) can significantly address these challenges, and many approaches have already been proposed to explore this field. However, there is currently no comprehensive survey that discusses the differences between LLM-based AIOps and traditional AIOps methods. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of AIOps technology for failure management in the LLM era. It includes a detailed definition of AIOps tasks for failure management, the data sources for AIOps, and the LLM-based approaches adopted for AIOps. Additionally, this survey explores the AIOps subtasks, the specific LLM-based approaches suitable for different AIOps subtasks, and the challenges and future directions of the domain, aiming to further its development and application., Comment: 35 pages

Scoring rules evaluate probabilistic forecasts of an unknown state against the realized state and are a fundamental building block in the incentivized elicitation of information and the training of machine learning models. This paper develops mechanisms for scoring elicited text against ground truth text using domain-knowledge-free queries to a large language model (specifically ChatGPT) and empirically evaluates their alignment with human preferences. The empirical evaluation is conducted on peer reviews from a peer-grading dataset and in comparison to manual instructor scores for the peer reviews.

Log parsing transforms log messages into structured formats, serving as a crucial step for log analysis. Despite a variety of log parsing methods that have been proposed, their performance on evolving log data remains unsatisfactory due to reliance on human-crafted rules or learning-based models with limited training data. The recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated strong abilities in understanding natural language and code, making it promising to apply LLMs for log parsing. Consequently, several studies have proposed LLM-based log parsers. However, LLMs may produce inaccurate templates, and existing LLM-based log parsers directly use the template generated by the LLM as the parsing result, hindering the accuracy of log parsing. Furthermore, these log parsers depend heavily on historical log data as demonstrations, which poses challenges in maintaining accuracy when dealing with scarce historical log data or evolving log data. To address these challenges, we propose AdaParser, an effective and adaptive log parsing framework using LLMs with self-generated in-context learning (SG-ICL) and self-correction. To facilitate accurate log parsing, AdaParser incorporates a novel component, a template corrector, which utilizes the LLM to correct potential parsing errors in the templates it generates. In addition, AdaParser maintains a dynamic candidate set composed of previously generated templates as demonstrations to adapt evolving log data. Extensive experiments on public large-scale datasets show that AdaParser outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all metrics, even in zero-shot scenarios. Moreover, when integrated with different LLMs, AdaParser consistently enhances the performance of the utilized LLMs by a large margin.

Differential privacy (DP) has the potential to enable privacy-preserving analysis on sensitive data, but requires analysts to judiciously spend a limited ``privacy loss budget'' $\epsilon$ across queries. Analysts conducting exploratory analyses do not, however, know all queries in advance and seldom have DP expertise. Thus, they are limited in their ability to specify $\epsilon$ allotments across queries prior to an analysis. To support analysts in spending $\epsilon$ efficiently, we propose a new interactive analysis paradigm, Measure-Observe-Remeasure, where analysts ``measure'' the database with a limited amount of $\epsilon$, observe estimates and their errors, and remeasure with more $\epsilon$ as needed. We instantiate the paradigm in an interactive visualization interface which allows analysts to spend increasing amounts of $\epsilon$ under a total budget. To observe how analysts interact with the Measure-Observe-Remeasure paradigm via the interface, we conduct a user study that compares the utility of $\epsilon$ allocations and findings from sensitive data participants make to the allocations and findings expected of a rational agent who faces the same decision task. We find that participants are able to use the workflow relatively successfully, including using budget allocation strategies that maximize over half of the available utility stemming from $\epsilon$ allocation. Their loss in performance relative to a rational agent appears to be driven more by their inability to access information and report it than to allocate $\epsilon$., Comment: Published in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) 2024

While deep networks have achieved broad success in analyzing natural images, when applied to medical scans, they often fail in unexcepted situations. We investigate this challenge and focus on model sensitivity to domain shifts, such as data sampled from different hospitals or data confounded by demographic variables such as sex, race, etc, in the context of chest X-rays and skin lesion images. A key finding we show empirically is that existing visual backbones lack an appropriate prior from the architecture for reliable generalization in these settings. Taking inspiration from medical training, we propose giving deep networks a prior grounded in explicit medical knowledge communicated in natural language. To this end, we introduce Knowledge-enhanced Bottlenecks (KnoBo), a class of concept bottleneck models that incorporates knowledge priors that constrain it to reason with clinically relevant factors found in medical textbooks or PubMed. KnoBo uses retrieval-augmented language models to design an appropriate concept space paired with an automatic training procedure for recognizing the concept. We evaluate different resources of knowledge and recognition architectures on a broad range of domain shifts across 20 datasets. In our comprehensive evaluation with two imaging modalities, KnoBo outperforms fine-tuned models on confounded datasets by 32.4% on average. Finally, evaluations reveal that PubMed is a promising resource for making medical models less sensitive to domain shift, outperforming other resources on both diversity of information and final prediction performance., Comment: Published in NeurIPS 2024 (Spotlight), project page: https://yueyang1996.github.io/knobo/

Chart question answering (ChartQA) tasks play a critical role in interpreting and extracting insights from visualization charts. While recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) like GPT-4o have shown promise in high-level ChartQA tasks, such as chart captioning, their effectiveness in low-level ChartQA tasks (e.g., identifying correlations) remains underexplored. In this paper, we address this gap by evaluating MLLMs on low-level ChartQA using a newly curated dataset, ChartInsights, which consists of 22,347 (chart, task, query, answer) covering 10 data analysis tasks across 7 chart types. We systematically evaluate 19 advanced MLLMs, including 12 open-source and 7 closed-source models. The average accuracy rate across these models is 39.8%, with GPT-4o achieving the highest accuracy at 69.17%. To further explore the limitations of MLLMs in low-level ChartQA, we conduct experiments that alter visual elements of charts (e.g., changing color schemes, adding image noise) to assess their impact on the task effectiveness. Furthermore, we propose a new textual prompt strategy, Chain-of-Charts, tailored for low-level ChartQA tasks, which boosts performance by 14.41%, achieving an accuracy of 83.58%. Finally, incorporating a visual prompt strategy that directs attention to relevant visual elements further improves accuracy to 84.32%., Comment: EMNLP 2024 Conference Paper

Calibration allows predictions to be reliably interpreted as probabilities by decision makers. We propose a decision-theoretic calibration error, the Calibration Decision Loss (CDL), defined as the maximum improvement in decision payoff obtained by calibrating the predictions, where the maximum is over all payoff-bounded decision tasks. Vanishing CDL guarantees the payoff loss from miscalibration vanishes simultaneously for all downstream decision tasks. We show separations between CDL and existing calibration error metrics, including the most well-studied metric Expected Calibration Error (ECE). Our main technical contribution is a new efficient algorithm for online calibration that achieves near-optimal $O(\frac{\log T}{\sqrt{T}})$ expected CDL, bypassing the $\Omega(T^{-0.472})$ lower bound for ECE by Qiao and Valiant (2021)., Comment: In FOCS 2024

Deformable image registration (DIR) is crucial in medical image analysis, enabling the exploration of biological dynamics such as organ motions and longitudinal changes in imaging. Leveraging Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) for registration, this extension work discusses how this framework can aid in the characterization of sequential biological processes. Utilizing the Neural ODE's ability to model state derivatives with neural networks, our Neural Ordinary Differential Equation Optimization-based (NODEO) framework considers voxels as particles within a dynamic system, defining deformation fields through the integration of neural differential equations. This method learns dynamics directly from data, bypassing the need for physical priors, making it exceptionally suitable for medical scenarios where such priors are unavailable or inapplicable. Consequently, the framework can discern underlying dynamics and use sequence data to regularize the transformation trajectory. We evaluated our framework on two clinical datasets: one for cardiac motion tracking and another for longitudinal brain MRI analysis. Demonstrating its efficacy in both 2D and 3D imaging scenarios, our framework offers flexibility and model agnosticism, capable of managing image sequences and facilitating label propagation throughout these sequences. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of how the Neural ODE-based framework uniquely benefits the image registration challenge., Comment: Journal extension of NODEO: A Neural Ordinary Differential Equation Based Optimization Framework for Deformable Image Registration, CVPR 2022

Dataset distillation is an advanced technique aimed at compressing datasets into significantly smaller counterparts, while preserving formidable training performance. Significant efforts have been devoted to promote evaluation accuracy under limited compression ratio while overlooked the robustness of distilled dataset. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark that, to the best of our knowledge, is the most extensive to date for evaluating the adversarial robustness of distilled datasets in a unified way. Our benchmark significantly expands upon prior efforts by incorporating a wider range of dataset distillation methods, including the latest advancements such as TESLA and SRe2L, a diverse array of adversarial attack methods, and evaluations across a broader and more extensive collection of datasets such as ImageNet-1K. Moreover, we assessed the robustness of these distilled datasets against representative adversarial attack algorithms like PGD and AutoAttack, while exploring their resilience from a frequency perspective. We also discovered that incorporating distilled data into the training batches of the original dataset can yield to improvement of robustness., Comment: * denotes equal contributions; ^ denotes corresponding author. In this updated version, we have expanded our research to include more experiments on various adversarial attack methods and latest dataset distillation studies. All new results have been incorporated into the document

Diagnosing rare diseases presents a common challenge in clinical practice, necessitating the expertise of specialists for accurate identification. The advent of machine learning offers a promising solution, while the development of such technologies is hindered by the scarcity of data on rare conditions and the demand for models that are both interpretable and trustworthy in a clinical context. Interpretable AI, with its capacity for human-readable outputs, can facilitate validation by clinicians and contribute to medical education. In the current work, we focus on choroid neoplasias, the most prevalent form of eye cancer in adults, albeit rare with 5.1 per million. We built the so-far largest dataset consisting of 750 patients, incorporating three distinct imaging modalities collected from 2004 to 2022. Our work introduces a concept-based interpretable model that distinguishes between three types of choroidal tumors, integrating insights from domain experts via radiological reports. Remarkably, this model not only achieves an F1 score of 0.91, rivaling that of black-box models, but also boosts the diagnostic accuracy of junior doctors by 42%. This study highlights the significant potential of interpretable machine learning in improving the diagnosis of rare diseases, laying a groundwork for future breakthroughs in medical AI that could tackle a wider array of complex health scenarios.

In recent years, substantial advancements have been achieved in understanding the diversity of the human virome and its intricate roles in human health and diseases. Despite this progress, the field of human virome research remains nascent, primarily hindered by the absence of effective methods, particularly in the domain of computational tools. This perspective systematically outlines ten computational challenges spanning various phases of virome studies, ranging from virus identification, sequencing quality evaluation, genome assembly, annotation of viral taxonomy, genome and proteins, inference of biological properties, applications of the virome in disease diagnosis, interactions with other microbes, and associations with human diseases. The resolution of these challenges necessitates ongoing collaboration among computational scientists, virologists, and multidisciplinary experts. In essence, this perspective serves as a comprehensive guide for directing computational efforts in human virome studies, aiming to significantly propel the field forward., Comment: 16 pages, 1 figures

One of the main motivations of MTL is to develop neural networks capable of inferring multiple tasks simultaneously. While countless methods have been proposed in the past decade investigating robust model architectures and efficient training algorithms, there is still lack of understanding of these methods when applied on smaller feature extraction backbones, the generalizability of the commonly used fast approximation technique of replacing parameter-level gradients with feature level gradients, and lack of comprehensive understanding of MTL challenges and how one can efficiently and effectively identify the challenges. In this paper, we focus on the aforementioned efficiency aspects of existing MTL methods. We first carry out large-scale experiments of the methods with smaller backbones and on a the MetaGraspNet dataset as a new test ground. We also compare the existing methods with and without using the fast gradient surrogate and empirically study the generalizability of this technique. Lastly, we propose Feature Disentanglement measure as a novel and efficient identifier of the challenges in MTL, and propose Ranking Similarity score as an evaluation metric for different identifiers to prove the faithfulness of our method.

Augmented reality for laparoscopic liver resection is a visualisation mode that allows a surgeon to localise tumours and vessels embedded within the liver by projecting them on top of a laparoscopic image. Preoperative 3D models extracted from CT or MRI data are registered to the intraoperative laparoscopic images during this process. In terms of 3D-2D fusion, most of the algorithms make use of anatomical landmarks to guide registration. These landmarks include the liver's inferior ridge, the falciform ligament, and the occluding contours. They are usually marked by hand in both the laparoscopic image and the 3D model, which is time-consuming and may contain errors if done by a non-experienced user. Therefore, there is a need to automate this process so that augmented reality can be used effectively in the operating room. We present the Preoperative-to-Intraoperative Laparoscopic Fusion Challenge (P2ILF), held during the Medical Imaging and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI 2022) conference, which investigates the possibilities of detecting these landmarks automatically and using them in registration. The challenge was divided into two tasks: 1) A 2D and 3D landmark detection task and 2) a 3D-2D registration task. The teams were provided with training data consisting of 167 laparoscopic images and 9 preoperative 3D models from 9 patients, with the corresponding 2D and 3D landmark annotations. A total of 6 teams from 4 countries participated, whose proposed methods were evaluated on 16 images and two preoperative 3D models from two patients. All the teams proposed deep learning-based methods for the 2D and 3D landmark segmentation tasks and differentiable rendering-based methods for the registration task. Based on the experimental outcomes, we propose three key hypotheses that determine current limitations and future directions for research in this domain., Comment: 24 pages

Humans frequently make decisions with the aid of artificially intelligent (AI) systems. A common pattern is for the AI to recommend an action to the human who retains control over the final decision. Researchers have identified ensuring that a human has appropriate reliance on an AI as a critical component of achieving complementary performance. We argue that the current definition of appropriate reliance used in such research lacks formal statistical grounding and can lead to contradictions. We propose a formal definition of reliance, based on statistical decision theory, which separates the concepts of reliance as the probability the decision-maker follows the AI's recommendation from challenges a human may face in differentiating the signals and forming accurate beliefs about the situation. Our definition gives rise to a framework that can be used to guide the design and interpretation of studies on human-AI complementarity and reliance. Using recent AI-advised decision making studies from literature, we demonstrate how our framework can be used to separate the loss due to mis-reliance from the loss due to not accurately differentiating the signals. We evaluate these losses by comparing to a baseline and a benchmark for complementary performance defined by the expected payoff achieved by a rational decision-maker facing the same decision task as the behavioral decision-makers.

Gridless direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation with multiple frequencies can be applied in acoustics source localization problems. We formulate this as an atomic norm minimization (ANM) problem and derive an equivalent regularization-free semi-definite program (SDP) thereby avoiding regularization bias. The DOA is retrieved using a Vandermonde decomposition on the Toeplitz matrix obtained from the solution of the SDP. We also propose a fast SDP program to deal with non-uniform array and frequency spacing. For non-uniform spacings, the Toeplitz structure will not exist, but the DOA is retrieved via irregular Vandermonde decomposition (IVD), and we theoretically guarantee the existence of the IVD. We extend ANM to the multiple measurement vector (MMV) cases and derive its equivalent regularization-free SDP. Using multiple frequencies and the MMV model, we can resolve more sources than the number of physical sensors for a uniform linear array. Numerical results demonstrate that the regularization-free framework is robust to noise and aliasing, and it overcomes the regularization bias.

Due to the sheer size of software logs, developers rely on automated log analysis. Log parsing, which parses semi-structured logs into a structured format, is a prerequisite of automated log analysis. However, existing log parsers are unsatisfactory when applied in practice because: 1) they ignore categories of variables, and 2) have poor generalization ability. To address the limitations of existing approaches, we propose LogPTR, the first end-to-end variable-aware log parser that can extract the static and dynamic parts in logs, and further identify the categories of variables. The key of LogPTR is using pointer network to copy words from the log message. We have performed extensive experiments on 16 public log datasets and the results show that LogPTR outperforms state-of-the-art log parsers both on general log parsing that extracts the log template and variable-aware log parsing that further identifies the category of variables.

Recent unsupervised anomaly detection methods often rely on feature extractors pretrained with auxiliary datasets or on well-crafted anomaly-simulated samples. However, this might limit their adaptability to an increasing set of anomaly detection tasks due to the priors in the selection of auxiliary datasets or the strategy of anomaly simulation. To tackle this challenge, we first introduce a prior-less anomaly generation paradigm and subsequently develop an innovative unsupervised anomaly detection framework named GRAD, grounded in this paradigm. GRAD comprises three essential components: (1) a diffusion model (PatchDiff) to generate contrastive patterns by preserving the local structures while disregarding the global structures present in normal images, (2) a self-supervised reweighting mechanism to handle the challenge of long-tailed and unlabeled contrastive patterns generated by PatchDiff, and (3) a lightweight patch-level detector to efficiently distinguish the normal patterns and reweighted contrastive patterns. The generation results of PatchDiff effectively expose various types of anomaly patterns, e.g. structural and logical anomaly patterns. In addition, extensive experiments on both MVTec AD and MVTec LOCO datasets also support the aforementioned observation and demonstrate that GRAD achieves competitive anomaly detection accuracy and superior inference speed., Comment: AAAI 2024

Coronary angiography is the gold standard imaging technique for studying and diagnosing coronary artery disease. However, the resulting 2D X-ray projections lose 3D information and exhibit visual ambiguities. In this work, we aim to establish dense correspondence in multi-view angiography, serving as a fundamental basis for various clinical applications and downstream tasks. To overcome the challenge of unavailable annotated data, we designed a data simulation pipeline using 3D Coronary Computed Tomography Angiography (CCTA). We formulated the problem of dense correspondence estimation as a query matching task over all points of interest in the given views. We established point-to-point query matching and advanced it to curve-to-curve correspondence, significantly reducing errors by minimizing ambiguity and improving topological awareness. The method was evaluated on a set of 1260 image pairs from different views across 8 clinically relevant angulation groups, demonstrating compelling results and indicating the feasibility of establishing dense correspondence in multi-view angiography.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits remarkable versatility and zero-shot learning abilities, owing largely to its extensive training data (SA-1B). Recognizing SAM's dependency on manual guidance given its category-agnostic nature, we identified unexplored potential within few-shot semantic segmentation tasks for remote sensing imagery. This research introduces a structured framework designed for the automation of few-shot semantic segmentation. It utilizes the SAM model and facilitates a more efficient generation of semantically discernible segmentation outcomes. Central to our methodology is a novel automatic prompt learning approach, leveraging prior guided masks to produce coarse pixel-wise prompts for SAM. Extensive experiments on the DLRSD datasets underline the superiority of our approach, outperforming other available few-shot methodologies.

The study explores the effectiveness of the Chain-of-Thought approach, known for its proficiency in language tasks by breaking them down into sub-tasks and intermediate steps, in improving vision-language tasks that demand sophisticated perception and reasoning. We present the "Description then Decision" strategy, which is inspired by how humans process signals. This strategy significantly improves probing task performance by 50%, establishing the groundwork for future research on reasoning paradigms in complex vision-language tasks.