LANE: Logic Alignment of Non-tuning Large Language Models and Online Recommendation Systems for Explainable Reason Generation

The explainability of recommendation systems is crucial for enhancing user trust and satisfaction. Leveraging large language models (LLMs) offers new opportunities for comprehensive recommendation logic generation. However, in existing related studies, fine-tuning LLM models for recommendation tasks incurs high computational costs and alignment issues with existing systems, limiting the application potential of proven proprietary/closed-source LLM models, such as GPT-4. In this work, our proposed effective strategy LANE aligns LLMs with online recommendation systems without additional LLMs tuning, reducing costs and improving explainability. This innovative approach addresses key challenges in integrating language models with recommendation systems while fully utilizing the capabilities of powerful proprietary models. Specifically, our strategy operates through several key components: semantic embedding, user multi-preference extraction using zero-shot prompting, semantic alignment, and explainable recommendation generation using Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting. By embedding item titles instead of IDs and utilizing multi-head attention mechanisms, our approach aligns the semantic features of user preferences with those of candidate items, ensuring coherent and user-aligned recommendations. Sufficient experimental results including performance comparison, questionnaire voting, and visualization cases prove that our method can not only ensure recommendation performance, but also provide easy-to-understand and reasonable recommendation logic.

WAVE: Weight Template for Adaptive Initialization of Variable-sized Models

The expansion of model parameters underscores the significance of pre-trained models; however, the constraints encountered during model deployment necessitate models of variable sizes. Consequently, the traditional pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm fails to address the initialization problem when target models are incompatible with pre-trained models. We tackle this issue from a multitasking perspective and introduce \textbf{WAVE}, which incorporates a set of shared \textbf{W}eight templates for \textbf{A}daptive initialization of \textbf{V}ariable-siz\textbf{E}d Models. During initialization, target models will initialize the corresponding weight scalers tailored to their model size, which are sufficient to learn the connection rules of weight templates based on the Kronecker product from a limited amount of data. For the construction of the weight templates, WAVE utilizes the \textit{Learngene} framework, which structurally condenses common knowledge from ancestry models into weight templates as the learngenes through knowledge distillation. This process allows the integration of pre-trained models' knowledge into structured knowledge according to the rules of weight templates. We provide a comprehensive benchmark for the learngenes, and extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of WAVE. The results show that WAVE achieves state-of-the-art performance when initializing models with various depth and width, and even outperforms the direct pre-training of $n$ entire models, particularly for smaller models, saving approximately $n\times$ and $5\times$ in computational and storage resources, respectively. WAVE simultaneously achieves the most efficient knowledge transfer across a series of datasets, specifically achieving an average improvement of 1.8\% and 1.2\% on 7 downstream datasets.

Predicting Many Properties of Crystals by a Single Deep Learning Model

The use of machine learning methods for predicting the properties of crystalline materials encounters significant challenges, primarily related to input encoding, output versatility, and interpretability. Here, we introduce CrystalBERT, an adaptable transformer-based framework with novel structure that integrates space group, elemental, and unit cell information. The method's adaptability lies not only in its ability to seamlessly combine diverse features but also in its capability to accurately predict a wide range of physically important properties, including topological properties, superconducting transition temperatures, dielectric constants, and more. CrystalBERT also provides insightful physical interpretations regarding the features that most significantly influence the target properties. Our findings indicate that space group and elemental information are more important for predicting topological and superconducting properties, in contrast to some properties that primarily depend on the unit cell information. This underscores the intricate nature of topological and superconducting properties. By incorporating all these features, we achieve a high accuracy of 91% in topological classification, surpassing prior studies and identifying previously misclassified topological materials, further demonstrating the effectiveness of our model.

Inaccurate Label Distribution Learning with Dependency Noise

In this paper, we introduce the Dependent Noise-based Inaccurate Label Distribution Learning (DN-ILDL) framework to tackle the challenges posed by noise in label distribution learning, which arise from dependencies on instances and labels. We start by modeling the inaccurate label distribution matrix as a combination of the true label distribution and a noise matrix influenced by specific instances and labels. To address this, we develop a linear mapping from instances to their true label distributions, incorporating label correlations, and decompose the noise matrix using feature and label representations, applying group sparsity constraints to accurately capture the noise. Furthermore, we employ graph regularization to align the topological structures of the input and output spaces, ensuring accurate reconstruction of the true label distribution matrix. Utilizing the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) for efficient optimization, we validate our method's capability to recover true labels accurately and establish a generalization error bound. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DN-ILDL effectively addresses the ILDL problem and outperforms existing LDL methods.

Talk to Parallel LiDARs: A Human-LiDAR Interaction Method Based on 3D Visual Grounding

LiDAR sensors play a crucial role in various applications, especially in autonomous driving. Current research primarily focuses on optimizing perceptual models with point cloud data as input, while the exploration of deeper cognitive intelligence remains relatively limited. To address this challenge, parallel LiDARs have emerged as a novel theoretical framework for the next-generation intelligent LiDAR systems, which tightly integrate physical, digital, and social systems. To endow LiDAR systems with cognitive capabilities, we introduce the 3D visual grounding task into parallel LiDARs and present a novel human-computer interaction paradigm for LiDAR systems. We propose Talk2LiDAR, a large-scale benchmark dataset tailored for 3D visual grounding in autonomous driving. Additionally, we present a two-stage baseline approach and an efficient one-stage method named BEVGrounding, which significantly improves grounding accuracy by fusing coarse-grained sentence and fine-grained word embeddings with visual features. Our experiments on Talk2Car-3D and Talk2LiDAR datasets demonstrate the superior performance of BEVGrounding, laying a foundation for further research in this domain.

Adjacent Leader Decentralized Stochastic Gradient Descent

This work focuses on the decentralized deep learning optimization framework. We propose Adjacent Leader Decentralized Gradient Descent (AL-DSGD), for improving final model performance, accelerating convergence, and reducing the communication overhead of decentralized deep learning optimizers. AL-DSGD relies on two main ideas. Firstly, to increase the influence of the strongest learners on the learning system it assigns weights to different neighbor workers according to both their performance and the degree when averaging among them, and it applies a corrective force on the workers dictated by both the currently best-performing neighbor and the neighbor with the maximal degree. Secondly, to alleviate the problem of the deterioration of the convergence speed and performance of the nodes with lower degrees, AL-DSGD relies on dynamic communication graphs, which effectively allows the workers to communicate with more nodes while keeping the degrees of the nodes low. Experiments demonstrate that AL-DSGD accelerates the convergence of the decentralized state-of-the-art techniques and improves their test performance especially in the communication constrained environments. We also theoretically prove the convergence of the proposed scheme. Finally, we release to the community a highly general and concise PyTorch-based library for distributed training of deep learning models that supports easy implementation of any distributed deep learning approach ((a)synchronous, (de)centralized).

Advancing Head and Neck Cancer Survival Prediction via Multi-Label Learning and Deep Model Interpretation

A comprehensive and reliable survival prediction model is of great importance to assist in the personalized management of Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) patients treated with curative Radiation Therapy (RT). In this work, we propose IMLSP, an Interpretable Multi-Label multi-modal deep Survival Prediction framework for predicting multiple HNC survival outcomes simultaneously and provide time-event specific visual explanation of the deep prediction process. We adopt Multi-Task Logistic Regression (MTLR) layers to convert survival prediction from a regression problem to a multi-time point classification task, and to enable predicting of multiple relevant survival outcomes at the same time. We also present Grad-TEAM, a Gradient-weighted Time-Event Activation Mapping approach specifically developed for deep survival model visual explanation, to generate patient-specific time-to-event activation maps. We evaluate our method with the publicly available RADCURE HNC dataset, where it outperforms the corresponding single-modal models and single-label models on all survival outcomes. The generated activation maps show that the model focuses primarily on the tumor and nodal volumes when making the decision and the volume of interest varies for high- and low-risk patients. We demonstrate that the multi-label learning strategy can improve the learning efficiency and prognostic performance, while the interpretable survival prediction model is promising to help understand the decision-making process of AI and facilitate personalized treatment.

TransAnaNet: Transformer-based Anatomy Change Prediction Network for Head and Neck Cancer Patient Radiotherapy

Early identification of head and neck cancer (HNC) patients who would experience significant anatomical change during radiotherapy (RT) is important to optimize patient clinical benefit and treatment resources. This study aims to assess the feasibility of using a vision-transformer (ViT) based neural network to predict RT-induced anatomic change in HNC patients. We retrospectively included 121 HNC patients treated with definitive RT/CRT. We collected the planning CT (pCT), planned dose, CBCTs acquired at the initial treatment (CBCT01) and fraction 21 (CBCT21), and primary tumor volume (GTVp) and involved nodal volume (GTVn) delineated on both pCT and CBCTs for model construction and evaluation. A UNet-style ViT network was designed to learn spatial correspondence and contextual information from embedded CT, dose, CBCT01, GTVp, and GTVn image patches. The model estimated the deformation vector field between CBCT01 and CBCT21 as the prediction of anatomic change, and deformed CBCT01 was used as the prediction of CBCT21. We also generated binary masks of GTVp, GTVn, and patient body for volumetric change evaluation. The predicted image from the proposed method yielded the best similarity to the real image (CBCT21) over pCT, CBCT01, and predicted CBCTs from other comparison models. The average MSE and SSIM between the normalized predicted CBCT to CBCT21 are 0.009 and 0.933, while the average dice coefficient between body mask, GTVp mask, and GTVn mask are 0.972, 0.792, and 0.821 respectively. The proposed method showed promising performance for predicting radiotherapy-induced anatomic change, which has the potential to assist in the decision-making of HNC Adaptive RT.

GaitMotion: A Multitask Dataset for Pathological Gait Forecasting

Gait benchmark empowers uncounted encouraging research fields such as gait recognition, humanoid locomotion, etc. Despite the growing focus on gait analysis, the research community is hindered by the limitations of the currently available databases, which mostly consist of videos or images with limited labeling. In this paper, we introduce GaitMotion, a multitask dataset leveraging wearable sensors to capture the patients' real-time movement with pathological gait. This dataset offers extensive ground-truth labeling for multiple tasks, including step/stride segmentation and step/stride length prediction, empowers researchers with a more holistic understanding of gait disturbances linked to neurological impairments. The wearable gait analysis suit captures the gait cycle, pattern, and parameters for both normal and pathological subjects. This data may prove beneficial for healthcare products focused on patient progress monitoring and post-disease recovery, as well as for forensics technologies aimed at person reidentification, and biomechanics research to aid in the development of humanoid robotics. Moreover, the analysis has considered the drift in data distribution across individual subjects. This drift can be attributed to each participant's unique behavioral habits or potential displacement of the sensor. Stride length variance for normal, Parkinson's, and stroke patients are compared to recognize the pathological walking pattern. As the baseline and benchmark, we provide an error of 14.1, 13.3, and 12.2 centimeters of stride length prediction for normal, Parkinson's, and Stroke gaits separately. We also analyzed the gait characteristics for normal and pathological gaits in terms of the gait cycle and gait parameters.

Towards Coarse-to-Fine Evaluation of Inference Efficiency for Large Language Models

In real world, large language models (LLMs) can serve as the assistant to help users accomplish their jobs, and also support the development of advanced applications. For the wide application of LLMs, the inference efficiency is an essential concern, which has been widely studied in existing work, and numerous optimization algorithms and code libraries have been proposed to improve it. Nonetheless, users still find it challenging to compare the effectiveness of all the above methods and understand the underlying mechanisms. In this work, we perform a detailed coarse-to-fine analysis of the inference performance of various code libraries. To evaluate the overall effectiveness, we examine four usage scenarios within two practical applications. We further provide both theoretical and empirical fine-grained analyses of each module in the Transformer architecture. Our experiments yield comprehensive results that are invaluable for researchers to evaluate code libraries and improve inference strategies.