A Survey on Employing Large Language Models for Text-to-SQL Tasks

The increasing volume of data stored in relational databases has led to the need for efficient querying and utilization of this data in various sectors. However, writing SQL queries requires specialized knowledge, which poses a challenge for non-professional users trying to access and query databases. Text-to-SQL parsing solves this issue by converting natural language queries into SQL queries, thus making database access more accessible for non-expert users. To take advantage of the recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), a range of new methods have emerged, with a primary focus on prompt engineering and fine-tuning. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of LLMs in text-to-SQL tasks, discussing benchmark datasets, prompt engineering, fine-tuning methods, and future research directions. We hope this review will enable readers to gain a broader understanding of the recent advances in this field and offer some insights into its future trajectory.

Graph Neural Networks Automated Design and Deployment on Device-Edge Co-Inference Systems

The key to device-edge co-inference paradigm is to partition models into computation-friendly and computation-intensive parts across the device and the edge, respectively. However, for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), we find that simply partitioning without altering their structures can hardly achieve the full potential of the co-inference paradigm due to various computational-communication overheads of GNN operations over heterogeneous devices. We present GCoDE, the first automatic framework for GNN that innovatively Co-designs the architecture search and the mapping of each operation on Device-Edge hierarchies. GCoDE abstracts the device communication process into an explicit operation and fuses the search of architecture and the operations mapping in a unified space for joint-optimization. Also, the performance-awareness approach, utilized in the constraint-based search process of GCoDE, enables effective evaluation of architecture efficiency in diverse heterogeneous systems. We implement the co-inference engine and runtime dispatcher in GCoDE to enhance the deployment efficiency. Experimental results show that GCoDE can achieve up to $44.9\times$ speedup and $98.2\%$ energy reduction compared to existing approaches across various applications and system configurations.

WAL-Net: Weakly supervised auxiliary task learning network for carotid plaques classification

The classification of carotid artery ultrasound images is a crucial means for diagnosing carotid plaques, holding significant clinical relevance for predicting the risk of stroke. Recent research suggests that utilizing plaque segmentation as an auxiliary task for classification can enhance performance by leveraging the correlation between segmentation and classification tasks. However, this approach relies on obtaining a substantial amount of challenging-to-acquire segmentation annotations. This paper proposes a novel weakly supervised auxiliary task learning network model (WAL-Net) to explore the interdependence between carotid plaque classification and segmentation tasks. The plaque classification task is primary task, while the plaque segmentation task serves as an auxiliary task, providing valuable information to enhance the performance of the primary task. Weakly supervised learning is adopted in the auxiliary task to completely break away from the dependence on segmentation annotations. Experiments and evaluations are conducted on a dataset comprising 1270 carotid plaque ultrasound images from Wuhan University Zhongnan Hospital. Results indicate that the proposed method achieved an approximately 1.3% improvement in carotid plaque classification accuracy compared to the baseline network. Specifically, the accuracy of mixed-echoic plaques classification increased by approximately 3.3%, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

FinEval: A Chinese Financial Domain Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in various natural language processing tasks, yet their efficacy in more challenging and domain-specific tasks remains largely unexplored. This paper presents FinEval, a benchmark specifically designed for the financial domain knowledge in the LLMs. FinEval is a collection of high-quality multiple-choice questions covering Finance, Economy, Accounting, and Certificate. It includes 4,661 questions spanning 34 different academic subjects. To ensure a comprehensive model performance evaluation, FinEval employs a range of prompt types, including zero-shot and few-shot prompts, as well as answer-only and chain-of-thought prompts. Evaluating state-of-the-art Chinese and English LLMs on FinEval, the results show that only GPT-4 achieved an accuracy close to 70% in different prompt settings, indicating significant growth potential for LLMs in the financial domain knowledge. Our work offers a more comprehensive financial knowledge evaluation benchmark, utilizing data of mock exams and covering a wide range of evaluated LLMs.

Fusing Structural and Functional Connectivities using Disentangled VAE for Detecting MCI

Brain network analysis is a useful approach to studying human brain disorders because it can distinguish patients from healthy people by detecting abnormal connections. Due to the complementary information from multiple modal neuroimages, multimodal fusion technology has a lot of potential for improving prediction performance. However, effective fusion of multimodal medical images to achieve complementarity is still a challenging problem. In this paper, a novel hierarchical structural-functional connectivity fusing (HSCF) model is proposed to construct brain structural-functional connectivity matrices and predict abnormal brain connections based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Specifically, the prior knowledge is incorporated into the separators for disentangling each modality of information by the graph convolutional networks (GCN). And a disentangled cosine distance loss is devised to ensure the disentanglement's effectiveness. Moreover, the hierarchical representation fusion module is designed to effectively maximize the combination of relevant and effective features between modalities, which makes the generated structural-functional connectivity more robust and discriminative in the cognitive disease analysis. Results from a wide range of tests performed on the public Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database show that the proposed model performs better than competing approaches in terms of classification evaluation. In general, the proposed HSCF model is a promising model for generating brain structural-functional connectivities and identifying abnormal brain connections as cognitive disease progresses.

Self-training with dual uncertainty for semi-supervised medical image segmentation

In the field of semi-supervised medical image segmentation, the shortage of labeled data is the fundamental problem. How to effectively learn image features from unlabeled images to improve segmentation accuracy is the main research direction in this field. Traditional self-training methods can partially solve the problem of insufficient labeled data by generating pseudo labels for iterative training. However, noise generated due to the model's uncertainty during training directly affects the segmentation results. Therefore, we added sample-level and pixel-level uncertainty to stabilize the training process based on the self-training framework. Specifically, we saved several moments of the model during pre-training, and used the difference between their predictions on unlabeled samples as the sample-level uncertainty estimate for that sample. Then, we gradually add unlabeled samples from easy to hard during training. At the same time, we added a decoder with different upsampling methods to the segmentation network and used the difference between the outputs of the two decoders as pixel-level uncertainty. In short, we selectively retrained unlabeled samples and assigned pixel-level uncertainty to pseudo labels to optimize the self-training process. We compared the segmentation results of our model with five semi-supervised approaches on the public 2017 ACDC dataset and 2018 Prostate dataset. Our proposed method achieves better segmentation performance on both datasets under the same settings, demonstrating its effectiveness, robustness, and potential transferability to other medical image segmentation tasks. Keywords: Medical image segmentation, semi-supervised learning, self-training, uncertainty estimation

HD-GCN:A Hybrid Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network

The information diffusion performance of GCN and its variant models is limited by the adjacency matrix, which can lower their performance. Therefore, we introduce a new framework for graph convolutional networks called Hybrid Diffusion-based Graph Convolutional Network (HD-GCN) to address the limitations of information diffusion caused by the adjacency matrix. In the HD-GCN framework, we initially utilize diffusion maps to facilitate the diffusion of information among nodes that are adjacent to each other in the feature space. This allows for the diffusion of information between similar points that may not have an adjacent relationship. Next, we utilize graph convolution to further propagate information among adjacent nodes after the diffusion maps, thereby enabling the spread of information among similar nodes that are adjacent in the graph. Finally, we employ the diffusion distances obtained through the use of diffusion maps to regularize and constrain the predicted labels of training nodes. This regularization method is then applied to the HD-GCN training, resulting in a smoother classification surface. The model proposed in this paper effectively overcomes the limitations of information diffusion imposed only by the adjacency matrix. HD-GCN utilizes hybrid diffusion by combining information diffusion between neighborhood nodes in the feature space and adjacent nodes in the adjacency matrix. This method allows for more comprehensive information propagation among nodes, resulting in improved model performance. We evaluated the performance of DM-GCN on three well-known citation network datasets and the results showed that the proposed framework is more effective than several graph-based semi-supervised learning methods.

Unified Normalization for Accelerating and Stabilizing Transformers

Solid results from Transformers have made them prevailing architectures in various natural language and vision tasks. As a default component in Transformers, Layer Normalization (LN) normalizes activations within each token to boost the robustness. However, LN requires on-the-fly statistics calculation in inference as well as division and square root operations, leading to inefficiency on hardware. What is more, replacing LN with other hardware-efficient normalization schemes (e.g., Batch Normalization) results in inferior performance, even collapse in training. We find that this dilemma is caused by abnormal behaviors of activation statistics, including large fluctuations over iterations and extreme outliers across layers. To tackle these issues, we propose Unified Normalization (UN), which can speed up the inference by being fused with other linear operations and achieve comparable performance on par with LN. UN strives to boost performance by calibrating the activation and gradient statistics with a tailored fluctuation smoothing strategy. Meanwhile, an adaptive outlier filtration strategy is applied to avoid collapse in training whose effectiveness is theoretically proved and experimentally verified in this paper. We demonstrate that UN can be an efficient drop-in alternative to LN by conducting extensive experiments on language and vision tasks. Besides, we evaluate the efficiency of our method on GPU. Transformers equipped with UN enjoy about 31% inference speedup and nearly 18% memory reduction. Code will be released at https://github.com/hikvision-research/Unified-Normalization.

A Safe Semi-supervised Graph Convolution Network

In the semi-supervised learning field, Graph Convolution Network (GCN), as a variant model of GNN, has achieved promising results for non-Euclidean data by introducing convolution into GNN. However, GCN and its variant models fail to safely use the information of risk unlabeled data, which will degrade the performance of semi-supervised learning. Therefore, we propose a Safe GCN framework (Safe-GCN) to improve the learning performance. In the Safe-GCN, we design an iterative process to label the unlabeled data. In each iteration, a GCN and its supervised version(S-GCN) are learned to find the unlabeled data with high confidence. The high-confidence unlabeled data and their pseudo labels are then added to the label set. Finally, both added unlabeled data and labeled ones are used to train a S-GCN which can achieve the safe exploration of the risk unlabeled data and enable safe use of large numbers of unlabeled data. The performance of Safe-GCN is evaluated on three well-known citation network datasets and the obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework over several graph-based semi-supervised learning methods.

NAFS: A Simple yet Tough-to-beat Baseline for Graph Representation Learning

Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown prominent performance in graph representation learning by leveraging knowledge from both graph structure and node features. However, most of them have two major limitations. First, GNNs can learn higher-order structural information by stacking more layers but can not deal with large depth due to the over-smoothing issue. Second, it is not easy to apply these methods on large graphs due to the expensive computation cost and high memory usage. In this paper, we present node-adaptive feature smoothing (NAFS), a simple non-parametric method that constructs node representations without parameter learning. NAFS first extracts the features of each node with its neighbors of different hops by feature smoothing, and then adaptively combines the smoothed features. Besides, the constructed node representation can further be enhanced by the ensemble of smoothed features extracted via different smoothing strategies. We conduct experiments on four benchmark datasets on two different application scenarios: node clustering and link prediction. Remarkably, NAFS with feature ensemble outperforms the state-of-the-art GNNs on these tasks and mitigates the aforementioned two limitations of most learning-based GNN counterparts.