MRI-based and metabolomics-based age scores act synergetically for mortality prediction shown by multi-cohort federated learning

Biological age scores are an emerging tool to characterize aging by estimating chronological age based on physiological biomarkers. Various scores have shown associations with aging-related outcomes. This study assessed the relation between an age score based on brain MRI images (BrainAge) and an age score based on metabolomic biomarkers (MetaboAge). We trained a federated deep learning model to estimate BrainAge in three cohorts. The federated BrainAge model yielded significantly lower error for age prediction across the cohorts than locally trained models. Harmonizing the age interval between cohorts further improved BrainAge accuracy. Subsequently, we compared BrainAge with MetaboAge using federated association and survival analyses. The results showed a small association between BrainAge and MetaboAge as well as a higher predictive value for the time to mortality of both scores combined than for the individual scores. Hence, our study suggests that both aging scores capture different aspects of the aging process.

T2VIndexer: A Generative Video Indexer for Efficient Text-Video Retrieval

Current text-video retrieval methods mainly rely on cross-modal matching between queries and videos to calculate their similarity scores, which are then sorted to obtain retrieval results. This method considers the matching between each candidate video and the query, but it incurs a significant time cost and will increase notably with the increase of candidates. Generative models are common in natural language processing and computer vision, and have been successfully applied in document retrieval, but their application in multimodal retrieval remains unexplored. To enhance retrieval efficiency, in this paper, we introduce a model-based video indexer named T2VIndexer, which is a sequence-to-sequence generative model directly generating video identifiers and retrieving candidate videos with constant time complexity. T2VIndexer aims to reduce retrieval time while maintaining high accuracy. To achieve this goal, we propose video identifier encoding and query-identifier augmentation approaches to represent videos as short sequences while preserving their semantic information. Our method consistently enhances the retrieval efficiency of current state-of-the-art models on four standard datasets. It enables baselines with only 30\%-50\% of the original retrieval time to achieve better retrieval performance on MSR-VTT (+1.0%), MSVD (+1.8%), ActivityNet (+1.5%), and DiDeMo (+0.2%). The code is available at https://github.com/Lilidamowang/T2VIndexer-generativeSearch.

IIU: Independent Inference Units for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering

Knowledge-based visual question answering requires external knowledge beyond visible content to answer the question correctly. One limitation of existing methods is that they focus more on modeling the inter-modal and intra-modal correlations, which entangles complex multimodal clues by implicit embeddings and lacks interpretability and generalization ability. The key challenge to solve the above problem is to separate the information and process it separately at the functional level. By reusing each processing unit, the generalization ability of the model to deal with different data can be increased. In this paper, we propose Independent Inference Units (IIU) for fine-grained multi-modal reasoning to decompose intra-modal information by the functionally independent units. Specifically, IIU processes each semantic-specific intra-modal clue by an independent inference unit, which also collects complementary information by communication from different units. To further reduce the impact of redundant information, we propose a memory update module to maintain semantic-relevant memory along with the reasoning process gradually. In comparison with existing non-pretrained multi-modal reasoning models on standard datasets, our model achieves a new state-of-the-art, enhancing performance by 3%, and surpassing basic pretrained multi-modal models. The experimental results show that our IIU model is effective in disentangling intra-modal clues as well as reasoning units to provide explainable reasoning evidence. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lilidamowang/IIU.

Visual-Semantic Decomposition and Partial Alignment for Document-based Zero-Shot Learning

Recent work shows that documents from encyclopedias serve as helpful auxiliary information for zero-shot learning. Existing methods align the entire semantics of a document with corresponding images to transfer knowledge. However, they disregard that semantic information is not equivalent between them, resulting in a suboptimal alignment. In this work, we propose a novel network to extract multi-view semantic concepts from documents and images and align the matching rather than entire concepts. Specifically, we propose a semantic decomposition module to generate multi-view semantic embeddings from visual and textual sides, providing the basic concepts for partial alignment. To alleviate the issue of information redundancy among embeddings, we propose the local-to-semantic variance loss to capture distinct local details and multiple semantic diversity loss to enforce orthogonality among embeddings. Subsequently, two losses are introduced to partially align visual-semantic embedding pairs according to their semantic relevance at the view and word-to-patch levels. Consequently, we consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods under two document sources in three standard benchmarks for document-based zero-shot learning. Qualitatively, we show that our model learns the interpretable partial association.

A2-DIDM: Privacy-preserving Accumulator-enabled Auditing for Distributed Identity of DNN Model

Recent booming development of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has facilitated an emerging model commercialization for the purpose of reinforcement on model performance, such as licensing or trading Deep Neural Network (DNN) models. However, DNN model trading may trigger concerns of the unauthorized replications or misuses over the model, so that the benefit of the model ownership will be violated. Model identity auditing is a challenging issue in protecting intellectual property of DNN models and verifying the integrity and ownership of models for guaranteeing trusts in transactions is one of the critical obstacles. In this paper, we focus on the above issue and propose a novel Accumulator-enabled Auditing for Distributed Identity of DNN Model (A2-DIDM) that utilizes blockchain and zero-knowledge techniques to protect data and function privacy while ensuring the lightweight on-chain ownership verification. The proposed model presents a scheme of identity records via configuring model weight checkpoints with corresponding zero-knowledge proofs, which incorporates predicates to capture incremental state changes in model weight checkpoints. Our scheme ensures both computational integrity of DNN training process and programmability, so that the uniqueness of the weight checkpoint sequence in a DNN model is preserved, ensuring the correctness of the model identity auditing. In addition, A2-DIDM also addresses privacy protections in distributed identity via a proposed method of accumulators. We systematically analyze the security and robustness of our proposed model and further evaluate the effectiveness and usability of auditing DNN model identities.

I$^3$Net: Inter-Intra-slice Interpolation Network for Medical Slice Synthesis

Medical imaging is limited by acquisition time and scanning equipment. CT and MR volumes, reconstructed with thicker slices, are anisotropic with high in-plane resolution and low through-plane resolution. We reveal an intriguing phenomenon that due to the mentioned nature of data, performing slice-wise interpolation from the axial view can yield greater benefits than performing super-resolution from other views. Based on this observation, we propose an Inter-Intra-slice Interpolation Network (I$^3$Net), which fully explores information from high in-plane resolution and compensates for low through-plane resolution. The through-plane branch supplements the limited information contained in low through-plane resolution from high in-plane resolution and enables continual and diverse feature learning. In-plane branch transforms features to the frequency domain and enforces an equal learning opportunity for all frequency bands in a global context learning paradigm. We further propose a cross-view block to take advantage of the information from all three views online. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of I$^3$Net, and noticeably outperforms state-of-the-art super-resolution, video frame interpolation and slice interpolation methods by a large margin. We achieve 43.90dB in PSNR, with at least 1.14dB improvement under the upscale factor of $\times$2 on MSD dataset with faster inference. Code is available at https://github.com/DeepMed-Lab-ECNU/Medical-Image-Reconstruction.

DiffuseTrace: A Transparent and Flexible Watermarking Scheme for Latent Diffusion Model

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) enable a wide range of applications but raise ethical concerns regarding illegal utilization.Adding watermarks to generative model outputs is a vital technique employed for copyright tracking and mitigating potential risks associated with AI-generated content. However, post-hoc watermarking techniques are susceptible to evasion. Existing watermarking methods for LDMs can only embed fixed messages. Watermark message alteration requires model retraining. The stability of the watermark is influenced by model updates and iterations. Furthermore, the current reconstruction-based watermark removal techniques utilizing variational autoencoders (VAE) and diffusion models have the capability to remove a significant portion of watermarks. Therefore, we propose a novel technique called DiffuseTrace. The goal is to embed invisible watermarks in all generated images for future detection semantically. The method establishes a unified representation of the initial latent variables and the watermark information through training an encoder-decoder model. The watermark information is embedded into the initial latent variables through the encoder and integrated into the sampling process. The watermark information is extracted by reversing the diffusion process and utilizing the decoder. DiffuseTrace does not rely on fine-tuning of the diffusion model components. The watermark is embedded into the image space semantically without compromising image quality. The encoder-decoder can be utilized as a plug-in in arbitrary diffusion models. We validate through experiments the effectiveness and flexibility of DiffuseTrace. DiffuseTrace holds an unprecedented advantage in combating the latest attacks based on variational autoencoders and Diffusion Models.

Memory-based Cross-modal Semantic Alignment Network for Radiology Report Generation

Generating radiology reports automatically reduces the workload of radiologists and helps the diagnoses of specific diseases. Many existing methods take this task as modality transfer process. However, since the key information related to disease accounts for a small proportion in both image and report, it is hard for the model to learn the latent relation between the radiology image and its report, thus failing to generate fluent and accurate radiology reports. To tackle this problem, we propose a memory-based cross-modal semantic alignment model (MCSAM) following an encoder-decoder paradigm. MCSAM includes a well initialized long-term clinical memory bank to learn disease-related representations as well as prior knowledge for different modalities to retrieve and use the retrieved memory to perform feature consolidation. To ensure the semantic consistency of the retrieved cross modal prior knowledge, a cross-modal semantic alignment module (SAM) is proposed. SAM is also able to generate semantic visual feature embeddings which can be added to the decoder and benefits report generation. More importantly, to memorize the state and additional information while generating reports with the decoder, we use learnable memory tokens which can be seen as prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed method which generates state-of-the-art performance on the MIMIC-CXR dataset.

InternLM2 Technical Report

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 has sparked discussions on the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, replicating such advancements in open-source models has been challenging. This paper introduces InternLM2, an open-source LLM that outperforms its predecessors in comprehensive evaluations across 6 dimensions and 30 benchmarks, long-context modeling, and open-ended subjective evaluations through innovative pre-training and optimization techniques. The pre-training process of InternLM2 is meticulously detailed, highlighting the preparation of diverse data types including text, code, and long-context data. InternLM2 efficiently captures long-term dependencies, initially trained on 4k tokens before advancing to 32k tokens in pre-training and fine-tuning stages, exhibiting remarkable performance on the 200k ``Needle-in-a-Haystack" test. InternLM2 is further aligned using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and a novel Conditional Online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (COOL RLHF) strategy that addresses conflicting human preferences and reward hacking. By releasing InternLM2 models in different training stages and model sizes, we provide the community with insights into the model's evolution.

Scientific Large Language Models: A Survey on Biological & Chemical Domains

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a transformative power in enhancing natural language comprehension, representing a significant stride toward artificial general intelligence. The application of LLMs extends beyond conventional linguistic boundaries, encompassing specialized linguistic systems developed within various scientific disciplines. This growing interest has led to the advent of scientific LLMs, a novel subclass specifically engineered for facilitating scientific discovery. As a burgeoning area in the community of AI for Science, scientific LLMs warrant comprehensive exploration. However, a systematic and up-to-date survey introducing them is currently lacking. In this paper, we endeavor to methodically delineate the concept of "scientific language", whilst providing a thorough review of the latest advancements in scientific LLMs. Given the expansive realm of scientific disciplines, our analysis adopts a focused lens, concentrating on the biological and chemical domains. This includes an in-depth examination of LLMs for textual knowledge, small molecules, macromolecular proteins, genomic sequences, and their combinations, analyzing them in terms of model architectures, capabilities, datasets, and evaluation. Finally, we critically examine the prevailing challenges and point out promising research directions along with the advances of LLMs. By offering a comprehensive overview of technical developments in this field, this survey aspires to be an invaluable resource for researchers navigating the intricate landscape of scientific LLMs.