Dual-Granularity Medication Recommendation Based on Causal Inference

As medical demands grow and machine learning technology advances, AI-based diagnostic and treatment systems are garnering increasing attention. Medication recommendation aims to integrate patients' long-term health records with medical knowledge, recommending accuracy and safe medication combinations for specific conditions. However, most existing researches treat medication recommendation systems merely as variants of traditional recommendation systems, overlooking the heterogeneity between medications and diseases. To address this challenge, we propose DGMed, a framework for medication recommendation. DGMed utilizes causal inference to uncover the connections among medical entities and presents an innovative feature alignment method to tackle heterogeneity issues. Specifically, this study first applies causal inference to analyze the quantified therapeutic effects of medications on specific diseases from historical records, uncovering potential links between medical entities. Subsequently, we integrate molecular-level knowledge, aligning the embeddings of medications and diseases within the molecular space to effectively tackle their heterogeneity. Ultimately, based on relationships at the entity level, we adaptively adjust the recommendation probabilities of medication and recommend medication combinations according to the patient's current health condition. Experimental results on a real-world dataset show that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art baselines in four evaluation metrics, demonstrating superior performance in both accuracy and safety aspects. Compared to the sub-optimal model, our approach improved accuracy by 4.40%, reduced the risk of side effects by 6.14%, and increased time efficiency by 47.15%.

Partially Recentralization Softmax Loss for Vision-Language Models Robustness

As Large Language Models make a breakthrough in natural language processing tasks (NLP), multimodal technique becomes extremely popular. However, it has been shown that multimodal NLP are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where the outputs of a model can be dramatically changed by a perturbation to the input. While several defense techniques have been proposed both in computer vision and NLP models, the multimodal robustness of models have not been fully explored. In this paper, we study the adversarial robustness provided by modifying loss function of pre-trained multimodal models, by restricting top K softmax outputs. Based on the evaluation and scoring, our experiments show that after a fine-tuning, adversarial robustness of pre-trained models can be significantly improved, against popular attacks. Further research should be studying, such as output diversity, generalization and the robustness-performance trade-off of this kind of loss functions. Our code will be available after this paper is accepted

Bayesian Inference Accelerator for Spiking Neural Networks

Bayesian neural networks offer better estimates of model uncertainty compared to frequentist networks. However, inference involving Bayesian models requires multiple instantiations or sampling of the network parameters, requiring significant computational resources. Compared to traditional deep learning networks, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have the potential to reduce computational area and power, thanks to their event-driven and spike-based computational framework. Most works in literature either address frequentist SNN models or non-spiking Bayesian neural networks. In this work, we demonstrate an optimization framework for developing and implementing efficient Bayesian SNNs in hardware by additionally restricting network weights to be binary-valued to further decrease power and area consumption. We demonstrate accuracies comparable to Bayesian binary networks with full-precision Bernoulli parameters, while requiring up to $25\times$ less spikes than equivalent binary SNN implementations. We show the feasibility of the design by mapping it onto Zynq-7000, a lightweight SoC, and achieve a $6.5 \times$ improvement in GOPS/DSP while utilizing up to 30 times less power compared to the state-of-the-art.

Force sensing to reconstruct potential energy landscapes for cluttered large obstacle traversal

Visual sensing of environmental geometry allows robots to use artificial potential fields to avoid sparse obstacles. Yet robots must further traverse cluttered large obstacles for applications like search and rescue through rubble and planetary exploration across Martain rocks. Recent studies discovered that to traverse cluttered large obstacles, multi-legged insects and insect-inspired robots make strenuous transitions across locomotor modes with major changes in body orientation. When viewed on a potential energy landscape resulting from locomotor-obstacle physical interaction, these are barrier-crossing transitions across landscape basins. This potential energy landscape approach may provide a modeling framework for cluttered large obstacle traversal. Here, we take the next step toward this vision by testing whether force sensing allows the reconstruction of the potential energy landscape. We developed a cockroach-inspired, minimalistic robot capable of sensing obstacle contact forces and torques around its body as it propelled forward against a pair of cluttered grass-like beam obstacles. We performed measurements over many traverses with systematically varied body orientations. Despite the forces and torques not being fully conservative, they well-matched the potential energy landscape gradients and the landscape reconstructed from them well-matched ground truth. In addition, inspired by cockroach observations, we found that robot head oscillation during traversal further improved the accuracies of force sensing and landscape reconstruction. We still need to study how to reconstruct landscape during a single traverse, as in applications, robots have little chance to use multiple traverses to sample the environment systematically and how to find landscape saddles for least-effort transitions to traverse.

Consensus Focus for Object Detection and minority classes

Ensemble methods exploit the availability of a given number of classifiers or detectors trained in single or multiple source domains and tasks to address machine learning problems such as domain adaptation or multi-source transfer learning. Existing research measures the domain distance between the sources and the target dataset, trains multiple networks on the same data with different samples per class, or combines predictions from models trained under varied hyperparameters and settings. Their solutions enhanced the performance on small or tail categories but hurt the rest. To this end, we propose a modified consensus focus for semi-supervised and long-tailed object detection. We introduce a voting system based on source confidence that spots the contribution of each model in a consensus, lets the user choose the relevance of each class in the target label space so that it relaxes minority bounding boxes suppression, and combines multiple models' results without discarding the poisonous networks. Our tests on synthetic driving datasets retrieved higher confidence and more accurate bounding boxes than the NMS, soft-NMS, and WBF.

SwitchTab: Switched Autoencoders Are Effective Tabular Learners

Self-supervised representation learning methods have achieved significant success in computer vision and natural language processing, where data samples exhibit explicit spatial or semantic dependencies. However, applying these methods to tabular data is challenging due to the less pronounced dependencies among data samples. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing SwitchTab, a novel self-supervised method specifically designed to capture latent dependencies in tabular data. SwitchTab leverages an asymmetric encoder-decoder framework to decouple mutual and salient features among data pairs, resulting in more representative embeddings. These embeddings, in turn, contribute to better decision boundaries and lead to improved results in downstream tasks. To validate the effectiveness of SwitchTab, we conduct extensive experiments across various domains involving tabular data. The results showcase superior performance in end-to-end prediction tasks with fine-tuning. Moreover, we demonstrate that pre-trained salient embeddings can be utilized as plug-and-play features to enhance the performance of various traditional classification methods (e.g., Logistic Regression, XGBoost, etc.). Lastly, we highlight the capability of SwitchTab to create explainable representations through visualization of decoupled mutual and salient features in the latent space.

Multi-Granularity Information Interaction Framework for Incomplete Utterance Rewriting

Recent approaches in Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (IUR) fail to capture the source of important words, which is crucial to edit the incomplete utterance, and introduce words from irrelevant utterances. We propose a novel and effective multi-task information interaction framework including context selection, edit matrix construction, and relevance merging to capture the multi-granularity of semantic information. Benefiting from fetching the relevant utterance and figuring out the important words, our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets Restoration-200K and CANAND in this field. Code will be provided on \url{https://github.com/yanmenxue/QR}.

Relation-Aware Question Answering for Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs

Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering(KBQA) aims to find the answer entity in a knowledge graph (KG), which requires multiple steps of reasoning. Existing retrieval-based approaches solve this task by concentrating on the specific relation at different hops and predicting the intermediate entity within the reasoning path. During the reasoning process of these methods, the representation of relations are fixed but the initial relation representation may not be optimal. We claim they fail to utilize information from head-tail entities and the semantic connection between relations to enhance the current relation representation, which undermines the ability to capture information of relations in KGs. To address this issue, we construct a \textbf{dual relation graph} where each node denotes a relation in the original KG (\textbf{primal entity graph}) and edges are constructed between relations sharing same head or tail entities. Then we iteratively do primal entity graph reasoning, dual relation graph information propagation, and interaction between these two graphs. In this way, the interaction between entity and relation is enhanced, and we derive better entity and relation representations. Experiments on two public datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, show that our approach achieves a significant performance gain over the prior state-of-the-art. Our code is available on \url{https://github.com/yanmenxue/RAH-KBQA}.

External Knowledge Augmented Polyphone Disambiguation Using Large Language Model

One of the key issues in Mandarin Chinese text-to-speech (TTS) systems is polyphone disambiguation when doing grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to solve the problem as a generation task. Following the trending research of large language models (LLM) and prompt learning, the proposed method consists of three modules. Retrieval module incorporates external knowledge which is a multi-level semantic dictionary of Chinese polyphonic characters to format the sentence into a prompt. Generation module adopts the decoder-only Transformer architecture to induce the target text. Postprocess module corrects the generated text into a valid result if needed. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the existing methods on a public dataset called CPP. We also empirically study the impacts of different templates of the prompt, different sizes of training data, and whether to incorporate external knowledge.

Noise Adaptor in Spiking Neural Networks

Recent strides in low-latency spiking neural network (SNN) algorithms have drawn significant interest, particularly due to their event-driven computing nature and fast inference capability. One of the most efficient ways to construct a low-latency SNN is by converting a pre-trained, low-bit artificial neural network (ANN) into an SNN. However, this conversion process faces two main challenges: First, converting SNNs from low-bit ANNs can lead to ``occasional noise" -- the phenomenon where occasional spikes are generated in spiking neurons where they should not be -- during inference, which significantly lowers SNN accuracy. Second, although low-latency SNNs initially show fast improvements in accuracy with time steps, these accuracy growths soon plateau, resulting in their peak accuracy lagging behind both full-precision ANNs and traditional ``long-latency SNNs'' that prioritize precision over speed. In response to these two challenges, this paper introduces a novel technique named ``noise adaptor.'' Noise adaptor can model occasional noise during training and implicitly optimize SNN accuracy, particularly at high simulation times $T$. Our research utilizes the ResNet model for a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the noise adaptor on low-latency SNNs. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms the previously reported quant-ANN-to-SNN conversion technique. We achieved an accuracy of 95.95\% within 4 time steps on CIFAR-10 using ResNet-18, and an accuracy of 74.37\% within 64 time steps on ImageNet using ResNet-50. Remarkably, these results were obtained without resorting to any noise correction methods during SNN inference, such as negative spikes or two-stage SNN simulations. Our approach significantly boosts the peak accuracy of low-latency SNNs, bringing them on par with the accuracy of full-precision ANNs. Code will be open source.