A generative framework to bridge data-driven models and scientific theories in language neuroscience

Representations from large language models are highly effective at predicting BOLD fMRI responses to language stimuli. However, these representations are largely opaque: it is unclear what features of the language stimulus drive the response in each brain area. We present generative explanation-mediated validation, a framework for generating concise explanations of language selectivity in the brain and then validating those explanations in follow-up experiments that use synthetic stimuli. This approach is successful at explaining selectivity both in individual voxels and cortical regions of interest (ROIs).We show that explanatory accuracy is closely related to the predictive power and stability of the underlying statistical models. These results demonstrate that LLMs can be used to bridge the widening gap between data-driven models and formal scientific theories.

Veridical Data Science for Medical Foundation Models

The advent of foundation models (FMs) such as large language models (LLMs) has led to a cultural shift in data science, both in medicine and beyond. This shift involves moving away from specialized predictive models trained for specific, well-defined domain questions to generalist FMs pre-trained on vast amounts of unstructured data, which can then be adapted to various clinical tasks and questions. As a result, the standard data science workflow in medicine has been fundamentally altered; the foundation model lifecycle (FMLC) now includes distinct upstream and downstream processes, in which computational resources, model and data access, and decision-making power are distributed among multiple stakeholders. At their core, FMs are fundamentally statistical models, and this new workflow challenges the principles of Veridical Data Science (VDS), hindering the rigorous statistical analysis expected in transparent and scientifically reproducible data science practices. We critically examine the medical FMLC in light of the core principles of VDS: predictability, computability, and stability (PCS), and explain how it deviates from the standard data science workflow. Finally, we propose recommendations for a reimagined medical FMLC that expands and refines the PCS principles for VDS including considering the computational and accessibility constraints inherent to FMs.

Mechanistic Interpretation through Contextual Decomposition in Transformers

Transformers exhibit impressive capabilities but are often regarded as black boxes due to challenges in understanding the complex nonlinear relationships between features. Interpreting machine learning models is of paramount importance to mitigate risks, and mechanistic interpretability is in particular of current interest as it opens up a window for guiding manual modifications and reverse-engineering solutions. In this work, we introduce contextual decomposition for transformers (CD-T), extending a prior work on CD for RNNs and CNNs, to address mechanistic interpretation computationally efficiently. CD-T is a flexible interpretation method for transformers. It can capture contributions of combinations of input features or source internal components (e.g. attention heads, feed-forward networks) to (1) final predictions or (2) the output of any target internal component. Using CD-T, we propose a novel algorithm for circuit discovery. On a real-world pathology report classification task: we show CD-T distills a more faithful circuit of attention heads with improved computational efficiency (speed up 2x) than a prior benchmark, path patching. As a versatile interpretation method, CD-T also exhibits exceptional capabilities for local interpretations. CD-T is shown to reliably find words and phrases of contrasting sentiment/topic on SST-2 and AGNews datasets. Through human experiments, we demonstrate CD-T enables users to identify the more accurate of two models and to better trust a model's outputs compared to alternative interpretation methods such as SHAP and LIME.

The Computational Curse of Big Data for Bayesian Additive Regression Trees: A Hitting Time Analysis

Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) is a popular Bayesian non-parametric regression model that is commonly used in causal inference and beyond. Its strong predictive performance is supported by theoretical guarantees that its posterior distribution concentrates around the true regression function at optimal rates under various data generative settings and for appropriate prior choices. In this paper, we show that the BART sampler often converges slowly, confirming empirical observations by other researchers. Assuming discrete covariates, we show that, while the BART posterior concentrates on a set comprising all optimal tree structures (smallest bias and complexity), the Markov chain's hitting time for this set increases with $n$ (training sample size), under several common data generative settings. As $n$ increases, the approximate BART posterior thus becomes increasingly different from the exact posterior (for the same number of MCMC samples), contrasting with earlier concentration results on the exact posterior. This contrast is highlighted by our simulations showing worsening frequentist undercoverage for approximate posterior intervals and a growing ratio between the MSE of the approximate posterior and that obtainable by artificially improving convergence via averaging multiple sampler chains. Finally, based on our theoretical insights, possibilities are discussed to improve the BART sampler convergence performance.

ScaLES: Scalable Latent Exploration Score for Pre-Trained Generative Networks

We develop Scalable Latent Exploration Score (ScaLES) to mitigate over-exploration in Latent Space Optimization (LSO), a popular method for solving black-box discrete optimization problems. LSO utilizes continuous optimization within the latent space of a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and is known to be susceptible to over-exploration, which manifests in unrealistic solutions that reduce its practicality. ScaLES is an exact and theoretically motivated method leveraging the trained decoder's approximation of the data distribution. ScaLES can be calculated with any existing decoder, e.g. from a VAE, without additional training, architectural changes, or access to the training data. Our evaluation across five LSO benchmark tasks and three VAE architectures demonstrates that ScaLES enhances the quality of the solutions while maintaining high objective values, leading to improvements over existing solutions. We believe that new avenues to LSO will be opened by ScaLES ability to identify out of distribution areas, differentiability, and computational tractability. Open source code for ScaLES is available at https://github.com/OmerRonen/scales.

The Impact of Initialization on LoRA Finetuning Dynamics

In this paper, we study the role of initialization in Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as originally introduced in Hu et al. (2021). Essentially, to start from the pretrained model as initialization for finetuning, one can either initialize B to zero and A to random (default initialization in PEFT package), or vice-versa. In both cases, the product BA is equal to zero at initialization, which makes finetuning starts from the pretrained model. These two initialization schemes are seemingly similar. They should in-principle yield the same performance and share the same optimal learning rate. We demonstrate that this is an incorrect intuition and that the first scheme (initializing B to zero and A to random) on average yields better performance compared to the other scheme. Our theoretical analysis shows that the reason behind this might be that the first initialization allows the use of larger learning rates (without causing output instability) compared to the second initialization, resulting in more efficient learning of the first scheme. We validate our results with extensive experiments on LLMs.

Minimum-Norm Interpolation Under Covariate Shift

Transfer learning is a critical part of real-world machine learning deployments and has been extensively studied in experimental works with overparameterized neural networks. However, even in the simplest setting of linear regression a notable gap still exists in the theoretical understanding of transfer learning. In-distribution research on high-dimensional linear regression has led to the identification of a phenomenon known as \textit{benign overfitting}, in which linear interpolators overfit to noisy training labels and yet still generalize well. This behavior occurs under specific conditions on the source covariance matrix and input data dimension. Therefore, it is natural to wonder how such high-dimensional linear models behave under transfer learning. We prove the first non-asymptotic excess risk bounds for benignly-overfit linear interpolators in the transfer learning setting. From our analysis, we propose a taxonomy of \textit{beneficial} and \textit{malignant} covariate shifts based on the degree of overparameterization. We follow our analysis with empirical studies that show these beneficial and malignant covariate shifts for linear interpolators on real image data, and for fully-connected neural networks in settings where the input data dimension is larger than the training sample size.

A Signature Based Approach Towards Global Channel Charting with Ultra Low Complexity

Channel charting, an unsupervised learning method that learns a low-dimensional representation from channel information to preserve geometrical property of physical space of user equipments (UEs), has drawn many attentions from both academic and industrial communities, because it can facilitate many downstream tasks, such as indoor localization, UE handover, beam management, and so on. However, many previous works mainly focus on charting that only preserves local geometry and use raw channel information to learn the chart, which do not consider the global geometry and are often computationally intensive and very time-consuming. Therefore, in this paper, a novel signature based approach for global channel charting with ultra low complexity is proposed. By using an iterated-integral based method called signature transform, a compact feature map and a novel distance metric are proposed, which enable channel charting with ultra low complexity and preserving both local and global geometry. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method using synthetic and open-source real-field datasets.

Large Stepsize Gradient Descent for Logistic Loss: Non-Monotonicity of the Loss Improves Optimization Efficiency

We consider gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize applied to logistic regression with linearly separable data, where the constant stepsize $\eta$ is so large that the loss initially oscillates. We show that GD exits this initial oscillatory phase rapidly -- in $\mathcal{O}(\eta)$ steps -- and subsequently achieves an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1 / (\eta t) )$ convergence rate after $t$ additional steps. Our results imply that, given a budget of $T$ steps, GD can achieve an accelerated loss of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/T^2)$ with an aggressive stepsize $\eta:= \Theta( T)$, without any use of momentum or variable stepsize schedulers. Our proof technique is versatile and also handles general classification loss functions (where exponential tails are needed for the $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/T^2)$ acceleration), nonlinear predictors in the neural tangent kernel regime, and online stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a large stepsize, under suitable separability conditions.

ED-Copilot: Reduce Emergency Department Wait Time with Language Model Diagnostic Assistance

In the emergency department (ED), patients undergo triage and multiple laboratory tests before diagnosis. This process is time-consuming, and causes ED crowding which significantly impacts patient mortality, medical errors, staff burnout, etc. This work proposes (time) cost-effective diagnostic assistance that explores the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in assisting ED clinicians to make time-efficient and accurate diagnoses. Using publicly available patient data, we collaborate with ED clinicians to curate MIMIC-ED-Assist, a benchmark that measures the ability of AI systems in suggesting laboratory tests that minimize ED wait times, while correctly predicting critical outcomes such as death. We develop ED-Copilot which sequentially suggests patient-specific laboratory tests and makes diagnostic predictions. ED-Copilot uses a pre-trained bio-medical language model to encode patient information and reinforcement learning to minimize ED wait time and maximize prediction accuracy of critical outcomes. On MIMIC-ED-Assist, ED-Copilot improves prediction accuracy over baselines while halving average wait time from four hours to two hours. Ablation studies demonstrate the importance of model scale and use of a bio-medical language model. Further analyses reveal the necessity of personalized laboratory test suggestions for diagnosing patients with severe cases, as well as the potential of ED-Copilot in providing ED clinicians with informative laboratory test recommendations. Our code is available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/ED-Copilot.