Constructing Confidence Intervals for Average Treatment Effects from Multiple Datasets

Constructing confidence intervals (CIs) for the average treatment effect (ATE) from patient records is crucial to assess the effectiveness and safety of drugs. However, patient records typically come from different hospitals, thus raising the question of how multiple observational datasets can be effectively combined for this purpose. In our paper, we propose a new method that estimates the ATE from multiple observational datasets and provides valid CIs. Our method makes little assumptions about the observational datasets and is thus widely applicable in medical practice. The key idea of our method is that we leverage prediction-powered inferences and thereby essentially `shrink' the CIs so that we offer more precise uncertainty quantification as compared to na\"ive approaches. We further prove the unbiasedness of our method and the validity of our CIs. We confirm our theoretical results through various numerical experiments. Finally, we provide an extension of our method for constructing CIs from combinations of experimental and observational datasets.

A Graph-Based Synthetic Data Pipeline for Scaling High-Quality Reasoning Instructions

Synthesizing high-quality reasoning data for continual training has been proven to be effective in enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, previous synthetic approaches struggle to easily scale up data and incur high costs in the pursuit of high quality. In this paper, we propose the Graph-based Synthetic Data Pipeline (GSDP), an economical and scalable framework for high-quality reasoning data synthesis. Inspired by knowledge graphs, we extracted knowledge points from seed data and constructed a knowledge point relationships graph to explore their interconnections. By exploring the implicit relationships among knowledge, our method achieves $\times$255 data expansion. Furthermore, GSDP led by open-source models, achieves synthesis quality comparable to GPT-4-0613 while maintaining $\times$100 lower costs. To tackle the most challenging mathematical reasoning task, we present the GSDP-MATH dataset comprising over 1.91 million pairs of math problems and answers. After fine-tuning on GSDP-MATH, GSDP-7B based on Mistral-7B achieves 37.7% accuracy on MATH and 78.4% on GSM8K, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. The dataset and models trained in this paper will be available.

Real-time volumetric free-hand ultrasound imaging for large-sized organs: A study of imaging the whole spine

Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging can overcome the limitations of conventional two dimensional (2D) ultrasound imaging in structural observation and measurement. However, conducting volumetric ultrasound imaging for large-sized organs still faces difficulties including long acquisition time, inevitable patient movement, and 3D feature recognition. In this study, we proposed a real-time volumetric free-hand ultrasound imaging system optimized for the above issues and applied it to the clinical diagnosis of scoliosis. This study employed an incremental imaging method coupled with algorithmic acceleration to enable real-time processing and visualization of the large amounts of data generated when scanning large-sized organs. Furthermore, to deal with the difficulty of image feature recognition, we proposed two tissue segmentation algorithms to reconstruct and visualize the spinal anatomy in 3D space by approximating the depth at which the bone structures are located and segmenting the ultrasound images at different depths. We validated the adaptability of our system by deploying it to multiple models of ultra-sound equipment and conducting experiments using different types of ultrasound probes. We also conducted experiments on 6 scoliosis patients and 10 normal volunteers to evaluate the performance of our proposed method. Ultrasound imaging of a volunteer spine from shoulder to crotch (more than 500 mm) was performed in 2 minutes, and the 3D imaging results displayed in real-time were compared with the corresponding X-ray images with a correlation coefficient of 0.96 in spinal curvature. Our proposed volumetric ultrasound imaging system might hold the potential to be clinically applied to other large-sized organs.

Boosting Semi-Supervised Scene Text Recognition via Viewing and Summarizing

Existing scene text recognition (STR) methods struggle to recognize challenging texts, especially for artistic and severely distorted characters. The limitation lies in the insufficient exploration of character morphologies, including the monotonousness of widely used synthetic training data and the sensitivity of the model to character morphologies. To address these issues, inspired by the human learning process of viewing and summarizing, we facilitate the contrastive learning-based STR framework in a self-motivated manner by leveraging synthetic and real unlabeled data without any human cost. In the viewing process, to compensate for the simplicity of synthetic data and enrich character morphology diversity, we propose an Online Generation Strategy to generate background-free samples with diverse character styles. By excluding background noise distractions, the model is encouraged to focus on character morphology and generalize the ability to recognize complex samples when trained with only simple synthetic data. To boost the summarizing process, we theoretically demonstrate the derivation error in the previous character contrastive loss, which mistakenly causes the sparsity in the intra-class distribution and exacerbates ambiguity on challenging samples. Therefore, a new Character Unidirectional Alignment Loss is proposed to correct this error and unify the representation of the same characters in all samples by aligning the character features in the student model with the reference features in the teacher model. Extensive experiment results show that our method achieves SOTA performance (94.7\% and 70.9\% average accuracy on common benchmarks and Union14M-Benchmark). Code will be available at https://github.com/qqqyd/ViSu.

ImpScore: A Learnable Metric For Quantifying The Implicitness Level of Language

Handling implicit language is essential for natural language processing systems to achieve precise text understanding and facilitate natural interactions with users. Despite its importance, the absence of a robust metric for accurately measuring the implicitness of language significantly constrains the depth of analysis possible in evaluating models' comprehension capabilities. This paper addresses this gap by developing a scalar metric that quantifies the implicitness level of language without relying on external references. Drawing on principles from traditional linguistics, we define ''implicitness'' as the divergence between semantic meaning and pragmatic interpretation. To operationalize this definition, we introduce ImpScore, a novel, reference-free metric formulated through an interpretable regression model. This model is trained using pairwise contrastive learning on a specially curated dataset comprising $112,580$ (implicit sentence, explicit sentence) pairs. We validate ImpScore through a user study that compares its assessments with human evaluations on out-of-distribution data, demonstrating its accuracy and strong correlation with human judgments. Additionally, we apply ImpScore to hate speech detection datasets, illustrating its utility and highlighting significant limitations in current large language models' ability to understand highly implicit content. The metric model and its training data are available at https://github.com/audreycs/ImpScore.

ExpertFlow: Optimized Expert Activation and Token Allocation for Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Inference

Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, while outperforming dense Large Language Models (LLMs) in terms of performance, face significant deployment challenges during inference due to their high memory demands. Existing offloading techniques, which involve swapping activated and idle experts between the GPU and CPU, often suffer from rigid expert caching mechanisms. These mechanisms fail to adapt to dynamic routing, leading to inefficient cache utilization, or incur prohibitive costs for prediction training. To tackle these inference-specific challenges, we introduce ExpertFlow, a comprehensive system specifically designed to enhance inference efficiency by accommodating flexible routing and enabling efficient expert scheduling between CPU and GPU. This reduces overhead and boosts system performance. Central to our approach is a predictive routing path-based offloading mechanism that utilizes a lightweight predictor to accurately forecast routing paths before computation begins. This proactive strategy allows for real-time error correction in expert caching, significantly increasing cache hit ratios and reducing the frequency of expert transfers, thereby minimizing I/O overhead. Additionally, we implement a dynamic token scheduling strategy that optimizes MoE inference by rearranging input tokens across different batches. This method not only reduces the number of activated experts per batch but also improves computational efficiency. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ExpertFlow achieves up to 93.72\% GPU memory savings and enhances inference speed by 2 to 10 times compared to baseline methods, highlighting its effectiveness and utility as a robust solution for resource-constrained inference scenarios.

FusionLLM: A Decentralized LLM Training System on Geo-distributed GPUs with Adaptive Compression

To alleviate hardware scarcity in training large deep neural networks (DNNs), particularly large language models (LLMs), we present FusionLLM, a decentralized training system designed and implemented for training DNNs using geo-distributed GPUs across different computing clusters or individual devices. Decentralized training faces significant challenges regarding system design and efficiency, including: 1) the need for remote automatic differentiation (RAD), 2) support for flexible model definitions and heterogeneous software, 3) heterogeneous hardware leading to low resource utilization or the straggler problem, and 4) slow network communication. To address these challenges, in the system design, we represent the model as a directed acyclic graph of operators (OP-DAG). Each node in the DAG represents the operator in the DNNs, while the edge represents the data dependency between operators. Based on this design, 1) users are allowed to customize any DNN without caring low-level operator implementation; 2) we enable the task scheduling with the more fine-grained sub-tasks, offering more optimization space; 3) a DAG runtime executor can implement RAD withour requiring the consistent low-level ML framework versions. To enhance system efficiency, we implement a workload estimator and design an OP-Fence scheduler to cluster devices with similar bandwidths together and partition the DAG to increase throughput. Additionally, we propose an AdaTopK compressor to adaptively compress intermediate activations and gradients at the slowest communication links. To evaluate the convergence and efficiency of our system and algorithms, we train ResNet-101 and GPT-2 on three real-world testbeds using 48 GPUs connected with 8 Mbps~10 Gbps networks. Experimental results demonstrate that our system and method can achieve 1.45 - 9.39x speedup compared to baseline methods while ensuring convergence.

Bandwidth-Aware and Overlap-Weighted Compression for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning

Current data compression methods, such as sparsification in Federated Averaging (FedAvg), effectively enhance the communication efficiency of Federated Learning (FL). However, these methods encounter challenges such as the straggler problem and diminished model performance due to heterogeneous bandwidth and non-IID (Independently and Identically Distributed) data. To address these issues, we introduce a bandwidth-aware compression framework for FL, aimed at improving communication efficiency while mitigating the problems associated with non-IID data. First, our strategy dynamically adjusts compression ratios according to bandwidth, enabling clients to upload their models at a close pace, thus exploiting the otherwise wasted time to transmit more data. Second, we identify the non-overlapped pattern of retained parameters after compression, which results in diminished client update signals due to uniformly averaged weights. Based on this finding, we propose a parameter mask to adjust the client-averaging coefficients at the parameter level, thereby more closely approximating the original updates, and improving the training convergence under heterogeneous environments. Our evaluations reveal that our method significantly boosts model accuracy, with a maximum improvement of 13% over the uncompressed FedAvg. Moreover, it achieves a $3.37\times$ speedup in reaching the target accuracy compared to FedAvg with a Top-K compressor, demonstrating its effectiveness in accelerating convergence with compression. The integration of common compression techniques into our framework further establishes its potential as a versatile foundation for future cross-device, communication-efficient FL research, addressing critical challenges in FL and advancing the field of distributed machine learning.

HARMONIC: Harnessing LLMs for Tabular Data Synthesis and Privacy Protection

Data serves as the fundamental foundation for advancing deep learning, particularly tabular data presented in a structured format, which is highly conducive to modeling. However, even in the era of LLM, obtaining tabular data from sensitive domains remains a challenge due to privacy or copyright concerns. Hence, exploring how to effectively use models like LLMs to generate realistic and privacy-preserving synthetic tabular data is urgent. In this paper, we take a step forward to explore LLMs for tabular data synthesis and privacy protection, by introducing a new framework HARMONIC for tabular data generation and evaluation. In the tabular data generation of our framework, unlike previous small-scale LLM-based methods that rely on continued pre-training, we explore the larger-scale LLMs with fine-tuning to generate tabular data and enhance privacy. Based on idea of the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, an instruction fine-tuning dataset is constructed to inspire LLMs to discover inter-row relationships. Then, with fine-tuning, LLMs are trained to remember the format and connections of the data rather than the data itself, which reduces the risk of privacy leakage. In the evaluation part of our framework, we develop specific privacy risk metrics DLT for LLM synthetic data generation, as well as performance evaluation metrics LLE for downstream LLM tasks. Our experiments find that this tabular data generation framework achieves equivalent performance to existing methods with better privacy, which also demonstrates our evaluation framework for the effectiveness of synthetic data and privacy risks in LLM scenarios.

MentalManip: A Dataset For Fine-grained Analysis of Mental Manipulation in Conversations

Mental manipulation, a significant form of abuse in interpersonal conversations, presents a challenge to identify due to its context-dependent and often subtle nature. The detection of manipulative language is essential for protecting potential victims, yet the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) currently faces a scarcity of resources and research on this topic. Our study addresses this gap by introducing a new dataset, named ${\rm M{\small ental}M{\small anip}}$, which consists of $4,000$ annotated movie dialogues. This dataset enables a comprehensive analysis of mental manipulation, pinpointing both the techniques utilized for manipulation and the vulnerabilities targeted in victims. Our research further explores the effectiveness of leading-edge models in recognizing manipulative dialogue and its components through a series of experiments with various configurations. The results demonstrate that these models inadequately identify and categorize manipulative content. Attempts to improve their performance by fine-tuning with existing datasets on mental health and toxicity have not overcome these limitations. We anticipate that ${\rm M{\small ental}M{\small anip}}$ will stimulate further research, leading to progress in both understanding and mitigating the impact of mental manipulation in conversations.