Unleashing the Potential of Large Language Models for Predictive Tabular Tasks in Data Science

In the domain of data science, the predictive tasks of classification, regression, and imputation of missing values are commonly encountered challenges associated with tabular data. This research endeavors to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) towards addressing these predictive tasks. Despite their proficiency in comprehending natural language, LLMs fall short in dealing with structured tabular data. This limitation stems from their lacking exposure to the intricacies of tabular data during their foundational training. Our research aims to mitigate this gap by compiling a comprehensive corpus of tables annotated with instructions and executing large-scale training of Llama-2 on this enriched dataset. Furthermore, we investigate the practical application of applying the trained model to zero-shot prediction, few-shot prediction, and in-context learning scenarios. Through extensive experiments, our methodology has shown significant improvements over existing benchmarks. These advancements highlight the efficacy of tailoring LLM training to solve table-related problems in data science, thereby establishing a new benchmark in the utilization of LLMs for enhancing tabular intelligence.

Design and Evaluation of a Compact 3D End-effector Assistive Robot for Adaptive Arm Support

We developed a 3D end-effector type of upper limb assistive robot, named as Assistive Robotic Arm Extender (ARAE), that provides transparency movement and adaptive arm support control to achieve home-based therapy and training in the real environment. The proposed system composes five degrees of freedom, including three active motors and two passive joints at the end-effector module. The core structure of the system is based on a parallel mechanism. The kinematic and dynamic modeling are illustrated in detail. The proposed adaptive arm support control framework calculates the compensated force based on the estimated human arm posture in 3D space. It firstly estimates human arm joint angles using two proposed methods: fixed torso and sagittal plane models without using external sensors such as IMUs, magnetic sensors, or depth cameras. The experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the two proposed angle estimation methods. Then, the estimated human joint angles were input into the human upper limb dynamics model to derive the required support force generated by the robot. The muscular activities were measured to evaluate the effects of the proposed framework. The obvious reduction of muscular activities was exhibited when participants were tested with the ARAE under an adaptive arm gravity compensation control framework. The overall results suggest that the ARAE system, when combined with the proposed control framework, has the potential to offer adaptive arm support. This integration could enable effective training with Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and interaction with real environments.

Towards Multimodal Video Paragraph Captioning Models Robust to Missing Modality

Video paragraph captioning (VPC) involves generating detailed narratives for long videos, utilizing supportive modalities such as speech and event boundaries. However, the existing models are constrained by the assumption of constant availability of a single auxiliary modality, which is impractical given the diversity and unpredictable nature of real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose a Missing-Resistant framework MR-VPC that effectively harnesses all available auxiliary inputs and maintains resilience even in the absence of certain modalities. Under this framework, we propose the Multimodal VPC (MVPC) architecture integrating video, speech, and event boundary inputs in a unified manner to process various auxiliary inputs. Moreover, to fortify the model against incomplete data, we introduce DropAM, a data augmentation strategy that randomly omits auxiliary inputs, paired with DistillAM, a regularization target that distills knowledge from teacher models trained on modality-complete data, enabling efficient learning in modality-deficient environments. Through exhaustive experimentation on YouCook2 and ActivityNet Captions, MR-VPC has proven to deliver superior performance on modality-complete and modality-missing test data. This work highlights the significance of developing resilient VPC models and paves the way for more adaptive, robust multimodal video understanding.

To Supervise or Not to Supervise: Understanding and Addressing the Key Challenges of 3D Transfer Learning

Transfer learning has long been a key factor in the advancement of many fields including 2D image analysis. Unfortunately, its applicability in 3D data processing has been relatively limited. While several approaches for 3D transfer learning have been proposed in recent literature, with contrastive learning gaining particular prominence, most existing methods in this domain have only been studied and evaluated in limited scenarios. Most importantly, there is currently a lack of principled understanding of both when and why 3D transfer learning methods are applicable. Remarkably, even the applicability of standard supervised pre-training is poorly understood. In this work, we conduct the first in-depth quantitative and qualitative investigation of supervised and contrastive pre-training strategies and their utility in downstream 3D tasks. We demonstrate that layer-wise analysis of learned features provides significant insight into the downstream utility of trained networks. Informed by this analysis, we propose a simple geometric regularization strategy, which improves the transferability of supervised pre-training. Our work thus sheds light onto both the specific challenges of 3D transfer learning, as well as strategies to overcome them.

Convergence analysis of OT-Flow for sample generation

Deep generative models aim to learn the underlying distribution of data and generate new ones. Despite the diversity of generative models and their high-quality generation performance in practice, most of them lack rigorous theoretical convergence proofs. In this work, we aim to establish some convergence results for OT-Flow, one of the deep generative models. First, by reformulating the framework of OT-Flow model, we establish the $\Gamma$-convergence of the formulation of OT-flow to the corresponding optimal transport (OT) problem as the regularization term parameter $\alpha$ goes to infinity. Second, since the loss function will be approximated by Monte Carlo method in training, we established the convergence between the discrete loss function and the continuous one when the sample number $N$ goes to infinity as well. Meanwhile, the approximation capability of the neural network provides an upper bound for the discrete loss function of the minimizers. The proofs in both aspects provide convincing assurances for OT-Flow.

Large Language Model-informed ECG Dual Attention Network for Heart Failure Risk Prediction

Heart failure (HF) poses a significant public health challenge, with a rising global mortality rate. Early detection and prevention of HF could significantly reduce its impact. We introduce a novel methodology for predicting HF risk using 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs). We present a novel, lightweight dual-attention ECG network designed to capture complex ECG features essential for early HF risk prediction, despite the notable imbalance between low and high-risk groups. This network incorporates a cross-lead attention module and twelve lead-specific temporal attention modules, focusing on cross-lead interactions and each lead's local dynamics. To further alleviate model overfitting, we leverage a large language model (LLM) with a public ECG-Report dataset for pretraining on an ECG-report alignment task. The network is then fine-tuned for HF risk prediction using two specific cohorts from the UK Biobank study, focusing on patients with hypertension (UKB-HYP) and those who have had a myocardial infarction (UKB-MI).The results reveal that LLM-informed pre-training substantially enhances HF risk prediction in these cohorts. The dual-attention design not only improves interpretability but also predictive accuracy, outperforming existing competitive methods with C-index scores of 0.6349 for UKB-HYP and 0.5805 for UKB-MI. This demonstrates our method's potential in advancing HF risk assessment with clinical complex ECG data.

Deep Learning for Trajectory Data Management and Mining: A Survey and Beyond

Trajectory computing is a pivotal domain encompassing trajectory data management and mining, garnering widespread attention due to its crucial role in various practical applications such as location services, urban traffic, and public safety. Traditional methods, focusing on simplistic spatio-temporal features, face challenges of complex calculations, limited scalability, and inadequate adaptability to real-world complexities. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the development and recent advances in deep learning for trajectory computing (DL4Traj). We first define trajectory data and provide a brief overview of widely-used deep learning models. Systematically, we explore deep learning applications in trajectory management (pre-processing, storage, analysis, and visualization) and mining (trajectory-related forecasting, trajectory-related recommendation, trajectory classification, travel time estimation, anomaly detection, and mobility generation). Notably, we encapsulate recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) that hold the potential to augment trajectory computing. Additionally, we summarize application scenarios, public datasets, and toolkits. Finally, we outline current challenges in DL4Traj research and propose future directions. Relevant papers and open-source resources have been collated and are continuously updated at: \href{https://github.com/yoshall/Awesome-Trajectory-Computing}{DL4Traj Repo}.

Entity6K: A Large Open-Domain Evaluation Dataset for Real-World Entity Recognition

Open-domain real-world entity recognition is essential yet challenging, involving identifying various entities in diverse environments. The lack of a suitable evaluation dataset has been a major obstacle in this field due to the vast number of entities and the extensive human effort required for data curation. We introduce Entity6K, a comprehensive dataset for real-world entity recognition, featuring 5,700 entities across 26 categories, each supported by 5 human-verified images with annotations. Entity6K offers a diverse range of entity names and categorizations, addressing a gap in existing datasets. We conducted benchmarks with existing models on tasks like image captioning, object detection, zero-shot classification, and dense captioning to demonstrate Entity6K's effectiveness in evaluating models' entity recognition capabilities. We believe Entity6K will be a valuable resource for advancing accurate entity recognition in open-domain settings.

Word Order's Impacts: Insights from Reordering and Generation Analysis

Existing works have studied the impacts of the order of words within natural text. They usually analyze it by destroying the original order of words to create a scrambled sequence, and then comparing the models' performance between the original and scrambled sequences. The experimental results demonstrate marginal drops. Considering this findings, different hypothesis about word order is proposed, including ``the order of words is redundant with lexical semantics'', and ``models do not rely on word order''. In this paper, we revisit the aforementioned hypotheses by adding a order reconstruction perspective, and selecting datasets of different spectrum. Specifically, we first select four different datasets, and then design order reconstruction and continuing generation tasks. Empirical findings support that ChatGPT relies on word order to infer, but cannot support or negate the redundancy relations between word order lexical semantics.

Tree Counting by Bridging 3D Point Clouds with Imagery

Accurate and consistent methods for counting trees based on remote sensing data are needed to support sustainable forest management, assess climate change mitigation strategies, and build trust in tree carbon credits. Two-dimensional remote sensing imagery primarily shows overstory canopy, and it does not facilitate easy differentiation of individual trees in areas with a dense canopy and does not allow for easy separation of trees when the canopy is dense. We leverage the fusion of three-dimensional LiDAR measurements and 2D imagery to facilitate the accurate counting of trees. We compare a deep learning approach to counting trees in forests using 3D airborne LiDAR data and 2D imagery. The approach is compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, like operating on 3D point cloud and 2D imagery. We empirically evaluate the different methods on the NeonTreeCount data set, which we use to define a tree-counting benchmark. The experiments show that FuseCountNet yields more accurate tree counts.