for the AREDS2 Deep Learning Research Group
Abstract:Humans naturally share information with those they are connected to, and video has become one of the dominant mediums for communication and expression on the Internet. To support the creation of high-quality large-scale video content, a modern pipeline requires a comprehensive understanding of both the raw input materials (e.g., the unedited footage captured by cameras) and the editing components (e.g., visual effects). In video editing scenarios, models must process multiple modalities (e.g., vision, audio, text) with strong background knowledge and handle flexible input lengths (e.g., hour-long raw videos), which poses significant challenges for traditional models. In this report, we introduce Vidi, a family of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for a wide range of video understand editing scenarios. The first release focuses on temporal retrieval, i.e., identifying the time ranges within the input videos corresponding to a given text query, which plays a critical role in intelligent editing. The model is capable of processing hour-long videos with strong temporal understanding capability, e.g., retrieve time ranges for certain queries. To support a comprehensive evaluation in real-world scenarios, we also present the VUE-TR benchmark, which introduces five key advancements. 1) Video duration: significantly longer than existing temporal retrival datasets, 2) Audio support: includes audio-based queries, 3) Query format: diverse query lengths/formats, 4) Annotation quality: ground-truth time ranges are manually annotated. 5) Evaluation metric: a refined IoU metric to support evaluation over multiple time ranges. Remarkably, Vidi significantly outperforms leading proprietary models, e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini, on the temporal retrieval task, indicating its superiority in video editing scenarios.
Abstract:Recent advances in reasoning-focused large language models (LLMs) mark a shift from general LLMs toward models designed for complex decision-making, a crucial aspect in medicine. However, their performance in specialized domains like ophthalmology remains underexplored. This study comprehensively evaluated and compared the accuracy and reasoning capabilities of four newly developed reasoning-focused LLMs, namely DeepSeek-R1, OpenAI o1, o3-mini, and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Thinking. Each model was assessed using 5,888 multiple-choice ophthalmology exam questions from the MedMCQA dataset in zero-shot setting. Quantitative evaluation included accuracy, Macro-F1, and five text-generation metrics (ROUGE-L, METEOR, BERTScore, BARTScore, and AlignScore), computed against ground-truth reasonings. Average inference time was recorded for a subset of 100 randomly selected questions. Additionally, two board-certified ophthalmologists qualitatively assessed clarity, completeness, and reasoning structure of responses to differential diagnosis questions.O1 (0.902) and DeepSeek-R1 (0.888) achieved the highest accuracy, with o1 also leading in Macro-F1 (0.900). The performance of models across the text-generation metrics varied: O3-mini excelled in ROUGE-L (0.151), o1 in METEOR (0.232), DeepSeek-R1 and o3-mini tied for BERTScore (0.673), DeepSeek-R1 (-4.105) and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Thinking (-4.127) performed best in BARTScore, while o3-mini (0.181) and o1 (0.176) led AlignScore. Inference time across the models varied, with DeepSeek-R1 being slowest (40.4 seconds) and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Thinking fastest (6.7 seconds). Qualitative evaluation revealed that DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Thinking tended to provide detailed and comprehensive intermediate reasoning, whereas o1 and o3-mini displayed concise and summarized justifications.
Abstract:Single domain generalization (SDG) has recently attracted growing attention in medical image segmentation. One promising strategy for SDG is to leverage consistent semantic shape priors across different imaging protocols, scanner vendors, and clinical sites. However, existing dictionary learning methods that encode shape priors often suffer from limited representational power with a small set of offline computed shape elements, or overfitting when the dictionary size grows. Moreover, they are not readily compatible with large foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM). In this paper, we propose a novel Mixture-of-Shape-Experts (MoSE) framework that seamlessly integrates the idea of mixture-of-experts (MoE) training into dictionary learning to efficiently capture diverse and robust shape priors. Our method conceptualizes each dictionary atom as a shape expert, which specializes in encoding distinct semantic shape information. A gating network dynamically fuses these shape experts into a robust shape map, with sparse activation guided by SAM encoding to prevent overfitting. We further provide this shape map as a prompt to SAM, utilizing the powerful generalization capability of SAM through bidirectional integration. All modules, including the shape dictionary, are trained in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate its effectiveness.
Abstract:Traditional benchmarks struggle to evaluate increasingly sophisticated language models in multilingual and culturally diverse contexts. To address this gap, we introduce MMLU-ProX, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark covering 13 typologically diverse languages with approximately 11,829 questions per language. Building on the challenging reasoning-focused design of MMLU-Pro, our framework employs a semi-automatic translation process: translations generated by state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) are rigorously evaluated by expert annotators to ensure conceptual accuracy, terminological consistency, and cultural relevance. We comprehensively evaluate 25 state-of-the-art LLMs using 5-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) and zero-shot prompting strategies, analyzing their performance across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Our experiments reveal consistent performance degradation from high-resource languages to lower-resource ones, with the best models achieving over 70% accuracy on English but dropping to around 40% for languages like Swahili, highlighting persistent gaps in multilingual capabilities despite recent advances. MMLU-ProX is an ongoing project; we are expanding our benchmark by incorporating additional languages and evaluating more language models to provide a more comprehensive assessment of multilingual capabilities.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) are widely used, but they often generate subtle factual errors, especially in long-form text. These errors are fatal in some specialized domains such as medicine. Existing fact-checking with grounding documents methods face two main challenges: (1) they struggle to understand complex multihop relations in long documents, often overlooking subtle factual errors; (2) most specialized methods rely on pairwise comparisons, requiring multiple model calls, leading to high resource and computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{\textit{GraphCheck}}, a fact-checking framework that uses extracted knowledge graphs to enhance text representation. Graph Neural Networks further process these graphs as a soft prompt, enabling LLMs to incorporate structured knowledge more effectively. Enhanced with graph-based reasoning, GraphCheck captures multihop reasoning chains which are often overlooked by existing methods, enabling precise and efficient fact-checking in a single inference call. Experimental results on seven benchmarks spanning both general and medical domains demonstrate a 6.1\% overall improvement over baseline models. Notably, GraphCheck outperforms existing specialized fact-checkers and achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art LLMs, such as DeepSeek-V3 and OpenAI-o1, with significantly fewer parameters.
Abstract:The advent of foundation models (FMs) is transforming medical domain. In ophthalmology, RETFound, a retina-specific FM pre-trained sequentially on 1.4 million natural images and 1.6 million retinal images, has demonstrated high adaptability across clinical applications. Conversely, DINOv2, a general-purpose vision FM pre-trained on 142 million natural images, has shown promise in non-medical domains. However, its applicability to clinical tasks remains underexplored. To address this, we conducted head-to-head evaluations by fine-tuning RETFound and three DINOv2 models (large, base, small) for ocular disease detection and systemic disease prediction tasks, across eight standardized open-source ocular datasets, as well as the Moorfields AlzEye and the UK Biobank datasets. DINOv2-large model outperformed RETFound in detecting diabetic retinopathy (AUROC=0.850-0.952 vs 0.823-0.944, across three datasets, all P<=0.007) and multi-class eye diseases (AUROC=0.892 vs. 0.846, P<0.001). In glaucoma, DINOv2-base model outperformed RETFound (AUROC=0.958 vs 0.940, P<0.001). Conversely, RETFound achieved superior performance over all DINOv2 models in predicting heart failure, myocardial infarction, and ischaemic stroke (AUROC=0.732-0.796 vs 0.663-0.771, all P<0.001). These trends persisted even with 10% of the fine-tuning data. These findings showcase the distinct scenarios where general-purpose and domain-specific FMs excel, highlighting the importance of aligning FM selection with task-specific requirements to optimise clinical performance.
Abstract:Current medical AI systems often fail to replicate real-world clinical reasoning, as they are predominantly trained and evaluated on static text and question-answer tasks. These tuning methods and benchmarks overlook critical aspects like evidence-based reasoning and handling distracting information. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark that simulates real-world diagnostic scenarios, integrating noise and difficulty levels aligned with USMLE standards. Moreover, we explore dialogue-based fine-tuning, which transforms static datasets into conversational formats to better capture iterative reasoning processes. Experiments show that dialogue-tuned models outperform traditional methods, with improvements of $9.64\%$ in multi-round reasoning scenarios and $6.18\%$ in accuracy in a noisy environment. Our findings highlight dialogue tuning as a promising approach for advancing clinically aligned and robust medical AI systems.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in role-playing scenarios, particularly in simulating domain-specific experts using tailored prompts. This ability enables LLMs to adopt the persona of individuals with specific backgrounds, offering a cost-effective and efficient alternative to traditional, resource-intensive user studies. By mimicking human behavior, LLMs can anticipate responses based on concrete demographic or professional profiles. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in simulating individuals with diverse backgrounds and analyze the consistency of these simulated behaviors compared to real-world outcomes. In particular, we explore the potential of LLMs to interpret and respond to discharge summaries provided to patients leaving the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). We evaluate and compare with human responses the comprehensibility of discharge summaries among individuals with varying educational backgrounds, using this analysis to assess the strengths and limitations of LLM-driven simulations. Notably, when LLMs are primed with educational background information, they deliver accurate and actionable medical guidance 88% of the time. However, when other information is provided, performance significantly drops, falling below random chance levels. This preliminary study shows the potential benefits and pitfalls of automatically generating patient-specific health information from diverse populations. While LLMs show promise in simulating health personas, our results highlight critical gaps that must be addressed before they can be reliably used in clinical settings. Our findings suggest that a straightforward query-response model could outperform a more tailored approach in delivering health information. This is a crucial first step in understanding how LLMs can be optimized for personalized health communication while maintaining accuracy.
Abstract:Backgrounds: Information extraction (IE) is critical in clinical natural language processing (NLP). While large language models (LLMs) excel on generative tasks, their performance on extractive tasks remains debated. Methods: We investigated Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) using 1,588 clinical notes from four sources (UT Physicians, MTSamples, MIMIC-III, and i2b2). We developed an annotated corpus covering 4 clinical entities and 16 modifiers, and compared instruction-tuned LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 against BiomedBERT in terms of performance, generalizability, computational resources, and throughput to BiomedBERT. Results: LLaMA models outperformed BiomedBERT across datasets. With sufficient training data, LLaMA showed modest improvements (1% on NER, 1.5-3.7% on RE); improvements were larger with limited training data. On unseen i2b2 data, LLaMA-3-70B outperformed BiomedBERT by 7% (F1) on NER and 4% on RE. However, LLaMA models required more computing resources and ran up to 28 times slower. We implemented "Kiwi," a clinical IE package featuring both models, available at https://kiwi.clinicalnlp.org/. Conclusion: This study is among the first to develop and evaluate a comprehensive clinical IE system using open-source LLMs. Results indicate that LLaMA models outperform BiomedBERT for clinical NER and RE but with higher computational costs and lower throughputs. These findings highlight that choosing between LLMs and traditional deep learning methods for clinical IE applications should remain task-specific, taking into account both performance metrics and practical considerations such as available computing resources and the intended use case scenarios.
Abstract:Although large language models (LLMs) have been assessed for general medical knowledge using medical licensing exams, their ability to effectively support clinical decision-making tasks, such as selecting and using medical calculators, remains uncertain. Here, we evaluate the capability of both medical trainees and LLMs to recommend medical calculators in response to various multiple-choice clinical scenarios such as risk stratification, prognosis, and disease diagnosis. We assessed eight LLMs, including open-source, proprietary, and domain-specific models, with 1,009 question-answer pairs across 35 clinical calculators and measured human performance on a subset of 100 questions. While the highest-performing LLM, GPT-4o, provided an answer accuracy of 74.3% (CI: 71.5-76.9%), human annotators, on average, outperformed LLMs with an accuracy of 79.5% (CI: 73.5-85.0%). With error analysis showing that the highest-performing LLMs continue to make mistakes in comprehension (56.6%) and calculator knowledge (8.1%), our findings emphasize that humans continue to surpass LLMs on complex clinical tasks such as calculator recommendation.