HIORE: Leveraging High-order Interactions for Unified Entity Relation Extraction

Entity relation extraction consists of two sub-tasks: entity recognition and relation extraction. Existing methods either tackle these two tasks separately or unify them with word-by-word interactions. In this paper, we propose HIORE, a new method for unified entity relation extraction. The key insight is to leverage the high-order interactions, i.e., the complex association among word pairs, which contains richer information than the first-order word-by-word interactions. For this purpose, we first devise a W-shape DNN (WNet) to capture coarse-level high-order connections. Then, we build a heuristic high-order graph and further calibrate the representations with a graph neural network (GNN). Experiments on three benchmarks (ACE04, ACE05, SciERC) show that HIORE achieves the state-of-the-art performance on relation extraction and an improvement of 1.1~1.8 F1 points over the prior best unified model.

Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling multilingual machine translation (MMT). In this paper, we systematically investigate the advantages and challenges of LLMs for MMT by answering two questions: 1) How well do LLMs perform in translating a massive number of languages? 2) Which factors affect LLMs' performance in translation? We evaluate popular LLMs, including XGLM, OPT, BLOOMZ, and ChatGPT, on 102 languages. Our empirical results show that even the best model ChatGPT still lags behind the supervised baseline NLLB in 83.33% of translation directions. Through further analysis, we discover that LLMs exhibit new working patterns when used for MMT. First, prompt semantics can surprisingly be ignored when given in-context exemplars, where LLMs still show strong performance even with unreasonable prompts. Second, cross-lingual exemplars can provide better task instruction for low-resource translation than exemplars in the same language pairs. Third, we observe the overestimated performance of BLOOMZ on dataset Flores-101, indicating the potential risk when using public datasets for evaluation.

Importance Weighted Expectation-Maximization for Protein Sequence Design

Designing protein sequences with desired biological function is crucial in biology and chemistry. Recent machine learning methods use a surrogate sequence-function model to replace the expensive wet-lab validation. How can we efficiently generate diverse and novel protein sequences with high fitness? In this paper, we propose IsEM-Pro, an approach to generate protein sequences towards a given fitness criterion. At its core, IsEM-Pro is a latent generative model, augmented by combinatorial structure features from a separately learned Markov random fields (MRFs). We develop an Monte Carlo Expectation-Maximization method (MCEM) to learn the model. During inference, sampling from its latent space enhances diversity while its MRFs features guide the exploration in high fitness regions. Experiments on eight protein sequence design tasks show that our IsEM-Pro outperforms the previous best methods by at least 55% on average fitness score and generates more diverse and novel protein sequences.

Influence of Myocardial Infarction on QRS Properties: A Simulation Study

The interplay between structural and electrical changes in the heart after myocardial infarction (MI) plays a key role in the initiation and maintenance of arrhythmia. The anatomical and electrophysiological properties of scar, border zone, and normal myocardium modify the electrocardiographic morphology, which is routinely analysed in clinical settings. However, the influence of various MI properties on the QRS is not intuitively predictable.In this work, we have systematically investigated the effects of 17 post-MI scenarios, varying the location, size, transmural extent, and conductive level of scarring and border zone area, on the forward-calculated QRS. Additionally, we have compared the contributions of different QRS score criteria for quantifying post-MI pathophysiology.The propagation of electrical activity in the ventricles is simulated via a Eikonal model on a unified coordinate system.The analysis has been performed on 49 subjects, and the results imply that the QRS is capable of identifying MI, suggesting the feasibility of inversely reconstructing infarct regions from QRS.There exist sensitivity variations of different QRS criteria for identifying 17 MI scenarios, which is informative for solving the inverse problem.

Graceful User Following for Mobile Balance Assistive Robot in Daily Activities Assistance

Numerous diseases and aging can cause degeneration of people's balance ability resulting in limited mobility and even high risks of fall. Robotic technologies can provide more intensive rehabilitation exercises or be used as assistive devices to compensate for balance ability. However, With the new healthcare paradigm shifting from hospital care to home care, there is a gap in robotic systems that can provide care at home. This paper introduces Mobile Robotic Balance Assistant (MRBA), a compact and cost-effective balance assistive robot that can provide both rehabilitation training and activities of daily living (ADLs) assistance at home. A three degrees of freedom (3-DoF) robotic arm was designed to mimic the therapist arm function to provide balance assistance to the user. To minimize the interference to users' natural pelvis movements and gait patterns, the robot must have a Human-Robot Interface(HRI) that can detect user intention accurately and follow the user's movement smoothly and timely. Thus, a graceful user following control rule was proposed. The overall control architecture consists of two parts: an observer for human inputs estimation and an LQR-based controller with disturbance rejection. The proposed controller is validated in high-fidelity simulation with actual human trajectories, and the results successfully show the effectiveness of the method in different walking modes.

Revisiting k-NN for Pre-trained Language Models

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), as parametric-based eager learners, have become the de-facto choice for current paradigms of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In contrast, k-Nearest-Neighbor (k-NN) classifiers, as the lazy learning paradigm, tend to mitigate over-fitting and isolated noise. In this paper, we revisit k-NN classifiers for augmenting the PLMs-based classifiers. From the methodological level, we propose to adopt k-NN with textual representations of PLMs in two steps: (1) Utilize k-NN as prior knowledge to calibrate the training process. (2) Linearly interpolate the probability distribution predicted by k-NN with that of the PLMs' classifier. At the heart of our approach is the implementation of k-NN-calibrated training, which treats predicted results as indicators for easy versus hard examples during the training process. From the perspective of the diversity of application scenarios, we conduct extensive experiments on fine-tuning, prompt-tuning paradigms and zero-shot, few-shot and fully-supervised settings, respectively, across eight diverse end-tasks. We hope our exploration will encourage the community to revisit the power of classical methods for efficient NLP\footnote{Code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/Revisit-KNN.

Generalizable Local Feature Pre-training for Deformable Shape Analysis

Transfer learning is fundamental for addressing problems in settings with little training data. While several transfer learning approaches have been proposed in 3D, unfortunately, these solutions typically operate on an entire 3D object or even scene-level and thus, as we show, fail to generalize to new classes, such as deformable organic shapes. In addition, there is currently a lack of understanding of what makes pre-trained features transferable across significantly different 3D shape categories. In this paper, we make a step toward addressing these challenges. First, we analyze the link between feature locality and transferability in tasks involving deformable 3D objects, while also comparing different backbones and losses for local feature pre-training. We observe that with proper training, learned features can be useful in such tasks, but, crucially, only with an appropriate choice of the receptive field size. We then propose a differentiable method for optimizing the receptive field within 3D transfer learning. Jointly, this leads to the first learnable features that can successfully generalize to unseen classes of 3D shapes such as humans and animals. Our extensive experiments show that this approach leads to state-of-the-art results on several downstream tasks such as segmentation, shape correspondence, and classification. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/pvnieo/vader}.

Aligning Multi-Sequence CMR Towards Fully Automated Myocardial Pathology Segmentation

Myocardial pathology segmentation (MyoPS) is critical for the risk stratification and treatment planning of myocardial infarction (MI). Multi-sequence cardiac magnetic resonance (MS-CMR) images can provide valuable information. For instance, balanced steady-state free precession cine sequences present clear anatomical boundaries, while late gadolinium enhancement and T2-weighted CMR sequences visualize myocardial scar and edema of MI, respectively. Existing methods usually fuse anatomical and pathological information from different CMR sequences for MyoPS, but assume that these images have been spatially aligned. However, MS-CMR images are usually unaligned due to the respiratory motions in clinical practices, which poses additional challenges for MyoPS. This work presents an automatic MyoPS framework for unaligned MS-CMR images. Specifically, we design a combined computing model for simultaneous image registration and information fusion, which aggregates multi-sequence features into a common space to extract anatomical structures (i.e., myocardium). Consequently, we can highlight the informative regions in the common space via the extracted myocardium to improve MyoPS performance, considering the spatial relationship between myocardial pathologies and myocardium. Experiments on a private MS-CMR dataset and a public dataset from the MYOPS2020 challenge show that our framework could achieve promising performance for fully automatic MyoPS.

Protecting Language Generation Models via Invisible Watermarking

Language generation models have been an increasingly powerful enabler for many applications. Many such models offer free or affordable API access, which makes them potentially vulnerable to model extraction attacks through distillation. To protect intellectual property (IP) and ensure fair use of these models, various techniques such as lexical watermarking and synonym replacement have been proposed. However, these methods can be nullified by obvious countermeasures such as "synonym randomization". To address this issue, we propose GINSEW, a novel method to protect text generation models from being stolen through distillation. The key idea of our method is to inject secret signals into the probability vector of the decoding steps for each target token. We can then detect the secret message by probing a suspect model to tell if it is distilled from the protected one. Experimental results show that GINSEW can effectively identify instances of IP infringement with minimal impact on the generation quality of protected APIs. Our method demonstrates an absolute improvement of 19 to 29 points on mean average precision (mAP) in detecting suspects compared to previous methods against watermark removal attacks.

ReDi: Efficient Learning-Free Diffusion Inference via Trajectory Retrieval

Diffusion models show promising generation capability for a variety of data. Despite their high generation quality, the inference for diffusion models is still time-consuming due to the numerous sampling iterations required. To accelerate the inference, we propose ReDi, a simple yet learning-free Retrieval-based Diffusion sampling framework. From a precomputed knowledge base, ReDi retrieves a trajectory similar to the partially generated trajectory at an early stage of generation, skips a large portion of intermediate steps, and continues sampling from a later step in the retrieved trajectory. We theoretically prove that the generation performance of ReDi is guaranteed. Our experiments demonstrate that ReDi improves the model inference efficiency by 2x speedup. Furthermore, ReDi is able to generalize well in zero-shot cross-domain image generation such as image stylization.