Training Small Multimodal Models to Bridge Biomedical Competency Gap: A Case Study in Radiology Imaging

The scaling laws and extraordinary performance of large foundation models motivate the development and utilization of such large models in biomedicine. However, despite early promising results on some biomedical benchmarks, there are still major challenges that need to be addressed before these models can be used in real-world applications. Frontier models such as GPT-4V still have major competency gaps in multimodal capabilities for biomedical applications. Moreover, pragmatic issues such as access, cost, latency, and compliance make it hard for clinicians to use privately-hosted state-of-the-art large models directly on private patient data. In this paper, we explore training open-source small multimodal models (SMMs) to bridge biomedical competency gaps for unmet clinical needs. To maximize data efficiency, we adopt a modular approach by incorporating state-of-the-art pre-trained models for image and text modalities, and focusing on training a lightweight adapter to ground each modality to the text embedding space. We conduct a comprehensive study of this approach on radiology imaging. For training, we assemble a large dataset with over 1 million image-text pairs. For evaluation, we propose a clinically driven novel approach using GPT-4 and demonstrate its parity with expert evaluation. We also study grounding qualitatively using attention. For best practice, we conduct a systematic ablation study on various choices in data engineering and multimodal training. The resulting LLaVA-Rad (7B) model attains state-of-the-art results on radiology tasks such as report generation and cross-modal retrieval, even outperforming much larger models such as GPT-4V and Med-PaLM M (84B). LLaVA-Rad is fast and can be run on a single V100 GPU in private settings, offering a promising state-of-the-art tool for real-world clinical applications.

T-Rex: Text-assisted Retrosynthesis Prediction

As a fundamental task in computational chemistry, retrosynthesis prediction aims to identify a set of reactants to synthesize a target molecule. Existing template-free approaches only consider the graph structures of the target molecule, which often cannot generalize well to rare reaction types and large molecules. Here, we propose T-Rex, a text-assisted retrosynthesis prediction approach that exploits pre-trained text language models, such as ChatGPT, to assist the generation of reactants. T-Rex first exploits ChatGPT to generate a description for the target molecule and rank candidate reaction centers based both the description and the molecular graph. It then re-ranks these candidates by querying the descriptions for each reactants and examines which group of reactants can best synthesize the target molecule. We observed that T-Rex substantially outperformed graph-based state-of-the-art approaches on two datasets, indicating the effectiveness of considering text information. We further found that T-Rex outperformed the variant that only use ChatGPT-based description without the re-ranking step, demonstrate how our framework outperformed a straightforward integration of ChatGPT and graph information. Collectively, we show that text generated by pre-trained language models can substantially improve retrosynthesis prediction, opening up new avenues for exploiting ChatGPT to advance computational chemistry. And the codes can be found at https://github.com/lauyikfung/T-Rex.

When an Image is Worth 1,024 x 1,024 Words: A Case Study in Computational Pathology

This technical report presents LongViT, a vision Transformer that can process gigapixel images in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we split the gigapixel image into a sequence of millions of patches and project them linearly into embeddings. LongNet is then employed to model the extremely long sequence, generating representations that capture both short-range and long-range dependencies. The linear computation complexity of LongNet, along with its distributed algorithm, enables us to overcome the constraints of both computation and memory. We apply LongViT in the field of computational pathology, aiming for cancer diagnosis and prognosis within gigapixel whole-slide images. Experimental results demonstrate that LongViT effectively encodes gigapixel images and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on cancer subtyping and survival prediction. Code and models will be available at https://aka.ms/LongViT.

Towards Large-scale Single-shot Millimeter-wave Imaging for Low-cost Security Inspection

Millimeter-wave (MMW) imaging is emerging as a promising technique for safe security inspection. It achieves a delicate balance between imaging resolution, penetrability and human safety, resulting in higher resolution compared to low-frequency microwave, stronger penetrability compared to visible light, and stronger safety compared to X ray. Despite of recent advance in the last decades, the high cost of requisite large-scale antenna array hinders widespread adoption of MMW imaging in practice. To tackle this challenge, we report a large-scale single-shot MMW imaging framework using sparse antenna array, achieving low-cost but high-fidelity security inspection under an interpretable learning scheme. We first collected extensive full-sampled MMW echoes to study the statistical ranking of each element in the large-scale array. These elements are then sampled based on the ranking, building the experimentally optimal sparse sampling strategy that reduces the cost of antenna array by up to one order of magnitude. Additionally, we derived an untrained interpretable learning scheme, which realizes robust and accurate image reconstruction from sparsely sampled echoes. Last, we developed a neural network for automatic object detection, and experimentally demonstrated successful detection of concealed centimeter-sized targets using 10% sparse array, whereas all the other contemporary approaches failed at the same sample sampling ratio. The performance of the reported technique presents higher than 50% superiority over the existing MMW imaging schemes on various metrics including precision, recall, and mAP50. With such strong detection ability and order-of-magnitude cost reduction, we anticipate that this technique provides a practical way for large-scale single-shot MMW imaging, and could advocate its further practical applications.

Large-scale Global Low-rank Optimization for Computational Compressed Imaging

Computational reconstruction plays a vital role in computer vision and computational photography. Most of the conventional optimization and deep learning techniques explore local information for reconstruction. Recently, nonlocal low-rank (NLR) reconstruction has achieved remarkable success in improving accuracy and generalization. However, the computational cost has inhibited NLR from seeking global structural similarity, which consequentially keeps it trapped in the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency and prevents it from high-dimensional large-scale tasks. To address this challenge, we report here the global low-rank (GLR) optimization technique, realizing highly-efficient large-scale reconstruction with global self-similarity. Inspired by the self-attention mechanism in deep learning, GLR extracts exemplar image patches by feature detection instead of conventional uniform selection. This directly produces key patches using structural features to avoid burdensome computational redundancy. Further, it performs patch matching across the entire image via neural-based convolution, which produces the global similarity heat map in parallel, rather than conventional sequential block-wise matching. As such, GLR improves patch grouping efficiency by more than one order of magnitude. We experimentally demonstrate GLR's effectiveness on temporal, frequency, and spectral dimensions, including different computational imaging modalities of compressive temporal imaging, magnetic resonance imaging, and multispectral filter array demosaicing. This work presents the superiority of inherent fusion of deep learning strategies and iterative optimization, and breaks the persistent dilemma of the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency for various large-scale reconstruction tasks.

MetaFill: Text Infilling for Meta-Path Generation on Heterogeneous Information Networks

Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN) is essential to study complicated networks containing multiple edge types and node types. Meta-path, a sequence of node types and edge types, is the core technique to embed HINs. Since manually curating meta-paths is time-consuming, there is a pressing need to develop automated meta-path generation approaches. Existing meta-path generation approaches cannot fully exploit the rich textual information in HINs, such as node names and edge type names. To address this problem, we propose MetaFill, a text-infilling-based approach for meta-path generation. The key idea of MetaFill is to formulate meta-path identification problem as a word sequence infilling problem, which can be advanced by Pretrained Language Models (PLMs). We observed the superior performance of MetaFill against existing meta-path generation methods and graph embedding methods that do not leverage meta-paths in both link prediction and node classification on two real-world HIN datasets. We further demonstrated how MetaFill can accurately classify edges in the zero-shot setting, where existing approaches cannot generate any meta-paths. MetaFill exploits PLMs to generate meta-paths for graph embedding, opening up new avenues for language model applications in graph analysis.