Causal Graph Discovery with Retrieval-Augmented Generation based Large Language Models

Causal graph recovery is essential in the field of causal inference. Traditional methods are typically knowledge-based or statistical estimation-based, which are limited by data collection biases and individuals' knowledge about factors affecting the relations between variables of interests. The advance of large language models (LLMs) provides opportunities to address these problems. We propose a novel method that utilizes the extensive knowledge contained within a large corpus of scientific literature to deduce causal relationships in general causal graph recovery tasks. This method leverages Retrieval Augmented-Generation (RAG) based LLMs to systematically analyze and extract pertinent information from a comprehensive collection of research papers. Our method first retrieves relevant text chunks from the aggregated literature. Then, the LLM is tasked with identifying and labelling potential associations between factors. Finally, we give a method to aggregate the associational relationships to build a causal graph. We demonstrate our method is able to construct high quality causal graphs on the well-known SACHS dataset solely from literature.

CANAMRF: An Attention-Based Model for Multimodal Depression Detection

Multimodal depression detection is an important research topic that aims to predict human mental states using multimodal data. Previous methods treat different modalities equally and fuse each modality by na\"ive mathematical operations without measuring the relative importance between them, which cannot obtain well-performed multimodal representations for downstream depression tasks. In order to tackle the aforementioned concern, we present a Cross-modal Attention Network with Adaptive Multi-modal Recurrent Fusion (CANAMRF) for multimodal depression detection. CANAMRF is constructed by a multimodal feature extractor, an Adaptive Multimodal Recurrent Fusion module, and a Hybrid Attention Module. Through experimentation on two benchmark datasets, CANAMRF demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, underscoring the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Diffusion-based Blind Text Image Super-Resolution

Recovering degraded low-resolution text images is challenging, especially for Chinese text images with complex strokes and severe degradation in real-world scenarios. Ensuring both text fidelity and style realness is crucial for high-quality text image super-resolution. Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in natural image synthesis and restoration due to their powerful data distribution modeling abilities and data generation capabilities. In this work, we propose an Image Diffusion Model (IDM) to restore text images with realistic styles. For diffusion models, they are not only suitable for modeling realistic image distribution but also appropriate for learning text distribution. Since text prior is important to guarantee the correctness of the restored text structure according to existing arts, we also propose a Text Diffusion Model (TDM) for text recognition which can guide IDM to generate text images with correct structures. We further propose a Mixture of Multi-modality module (MoM) to make these two diffusion models cooperate with each other in all the diffusion steps. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our Diffusion-based Blind Text Image Super-Resolution (DiffTSR) can restore text images with more accurate text structures as well as more realistic appearances simultaneously.

Training Robust Deep Physiological Measurement Models with Synthetic Video-based Data

Recent advances in supervised deep learning techniques have demonstrated the possibility to remotely measure human physiological vital signs (e.g., photoplethysmograph, heart rate) just from facial videos. However, the performance of these methods heavily relies on the availability and diversity of real labeled data. Yet, collecting large-scale real-world data with high-quality labels is typically challenging and resource intensive, which also raises privacy concerns when storing personal bio-metric data. Synthetic video-based datasets (e.g., SCAMPS \cite{mcduff2022scamps}) with photo-realistic synthesized avatars are introduced to alleviate the issues while providing high-quality synthetic data. However, there exists a significant gap between synthetic and real-world data, which hinders the generalization of neural models trained on these synthetic datasets. In this paper, we proposed several measures to add real-world noise to synthetic physiological signals and corresponding facial videos. We experimented with individual and combined augmentation methods and evaluated our framework on three public real-world datasets. Our results show that we were able to reduce the average MAE from 6.9 to 2.0.

A Novel Few-Shot Relation Extraction Pipeline Based on Adaptive Prototype Fusion

Few-shot relation extraction (FSRE) aims at recognizing unseen relations by learning with merely a handful of annotated instances. To more effectively generalize to new relations, this paper proposes a novel pipeline for the FSRE task based on adaptive prototype fusion. Specifically, for each relation class, the pipeline fully explores the relation information by concatenating two types of embedding, and then elaborately combine the relation representation with the adaptive prototype fusion mechanism. The whole framework can be effectively and efficiently optimized in an end-to-end fashion. Experiments on the benchmark dataset FewRel 1.0 show a significant improvement of our method against state-of-the-art methods.

Deep Physiological Sensing Toolbox

Camera physiological measurement is a fast growing field of computer vision. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) uses video cameras (imagers) to measure the peripheral blood volume pulse (BVP). Simply, this enables heart rate measurement via webcams, smartphone cameras and many other imaging devices. The current state-of-the-art methods are supervised deep neural architectures that have large numbers of parameters and a signal number of hyperparameters. Replication of results and benchmarking of new models is critical for scientific progress. However, as with many other applications of deep learning, reliable codebases are not easy to find. We present a comprehensive toolbox, rPPG-Toolbox, containing code for training and evaluating unsupervised and supervised rPPG models: https://github.com/ubicomplab/rPPG-Toolbox

FinBERT-MRC: financial named entity recognition using BERT under the machine reading comprehension paradigm

Financial named entity recognition (FinNER) from literature is a challenging task in the field of financial text information extraction, which aims to extract a large amount of financial knowledge from unstructured texts. It is widely accepted to use sequence tagging frameworks to implement FinNER tasks. However, such sequence tagging models cannot fully take advantage of the semantic information in the texts. Instead, we formulate the FinNER task as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) problem and propose a new model termed FinBERT-MRC. This formulation introduces significant prior information by utilizing well-designed queries, and extracts start index and end index of target entities without decoding modules such as conditional random fields (CRF). We conduct experiments on a publicly available Chinese financial dataset ChFinAnn and a real-word bussiness dataset AdminPunish. FinBERT-MRC model achieves average F1 scores of 92.78% and 96.80% on the two datasets, respectively, with average F1 gains +3.94% and +0.89% over some sequence tagging models including BiLSTM-CRF, BERT-Tagger, and BERT-CRF. The source code is available at https://github.com/zyz0000/FinBERT-MRC.

Power in Liquid Democracy

The paper develops a theory of power for delegable proxy voting systems. We define a power index able to measure the influence of both voters and delegators. Using this index, which we characterize axiomatically, we extend an earlier game-theoretic model by incorporating power-seeking behavior by agents. We analytically study the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria in such a model. Finally, by means of simulations, we study the effect of relevant parameters on the emergence of power inequalities in the model.